Inside the Studio: The Paintings that Helped Me Find My Creative Rhythm Again
Well now what?
That’s essentially the first thought I had when I finally had the urge to start painting again after an exhausting and uncreative summer. My art desk was clean. I had a small stack of paper trimmed up and ready to paint. My favorite Winsor & Newton watercolor palette was ready to go. My favorite water jars were filled. All I needed was to just start.
Overcoming the Blank Page Scaries
There is nothing worse than a blank piece of paper. There is no rational reason for why a clean sheet of paper would be so intimating, but in that blank page sits all of my insecurities and typically irrational thoughts such as:
What if it turns out bad?
Reality check: Um it probably will be bad, but it’s a piece of paper. You can throw it out. Who is going to know?
What if I have forgotten how to paint?
Reality check: Painting is a muscle like anything else. If you were a runner and you stopped running, you would still know how to run. Would you go and run a marathon on your first day? Probably not. So maybe just start small… start with slopping some paint around.
What if I never paint anything pretty EVER AGAIN?!?!?!
Reality check: 1. Stop being melodramatic. 2. You were not Picasso to begin with, so maybe take the fatalism down a notch. 3. Since when did we have to be a good painter anyway? When did we decide that painting was only worth it when it was good?
And with that, my internal mean girl was put in the corner and not allowed to speak for the rest of the session. I put on a podcast and made the decision to: just start. To be messy. To be bad. To enjoy myself. To begin again.
The Messy Beginning
Those early paintings were a struggle. My brain knew what I wanted to paint: how I wanted colors to look, how I wanted textures to feel, but none of that materialized in my first paintings. I pushed through to the end of that painting session with a few half-finished pieces. But I managed to drag myself back to finish them the next day, resulting in my first small landscapes after a few months away from my paints. Not my best, but certainly not my worst.
Not my best, but not my worst.
Dividing up my paper into smaller tiles often makes starting easier.
The Awkward Middle
So I showed up again. And again. I kept my paintings on the smaller side, even dividing up a larger piece of paper into smaller sections and treated them more like studies to see if I wanted to try a painting on a larger scale once I felt more confident and motivated. So much of my work related to where I live, Colorado, and the places we travel to hike, climb, and camp. So I pulled out some of my favorite reference photos from recent Colorado summers and travel, hoping that something familiar would help my motivation return.
My favorite two pieces from this set came from recent visits to Wild Iris, Wyoming, a climbing area outside of Lander. We hadn’t visited this area for years and it just was everything I needed after a crazy summer: wide open space, blue sky, few people.
Sunset, Wild Iris, Wyoming
Parking Lot View, Wild Iris, Wyoming
Honest talk: It took about a month before I felt like I wasn’t just going through the motions of painting. A month before I was picking out reference photos and sketching out different ways that I could paint them. A month before experimenting felt fun and I was not worrying about the results. A month before I was itching to get home from work to make progress on a painting. A month before I was coming out of the studio to show my husband what I just finished and to see what he thought.
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The Creative Shift
It is very easy to get caught up with what I should be doing. How I should be painting. What my creative practice should look like. What success should look like. When in reality, there is no one way to do anything. What feels like slow progress is still progress.
Each mediocre painting usually has at least one aspect that I really liked.
Sometimes a failed painting makes me want to try again.
Each bad painting shows me what I don’t like.
Sometimes I like a painting so much I want it up on my wall immediately.
And that’s when I know I am on to something.
Rocky Mountain Fall, Fall 2025
Sunset Abstract, 2025
Alpine Fall, 2025
After two months of showing up regularly, I have a stack of completed paintings, some of which I like so much I want to hang them up on my wall and not sell them. I have a long list of ideas to tackle and new paintings to plan in my sketchbook. Creativity ebbs and flows. Starting again is always hard, but it’s worth it.
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