Celebrate Tiny
Embracing the limits of 'small' in my creative process
Hello friends,
Welcome back to this little creative corner :)
A couple of months ago, I sat on a neighbouring street with an A6/pocket-sized sketchbook and loosely traced the outline of the house across from me. I captured the Japanese maple in its front lawn with a few quick strokes and continued on my run. The more I ran and walked on this same route, the more I noticed the Little Free Libraries dotted along the street. Each small wooden cupboard with a roof and a door could hold about twenty books, all free and available for borrowing and exchanging; the only rule is to share books as you take books when you can.
I have been fascinated by “tiny” for awhile now. I used to binge-watch videos about tiny homes and van life and bus conversions and families homeschooling while travelling in RVs. We even went to the tiny home show in Ancaster a couple of years ago. I was and still am fascinated by the idea of living tiny - distilling your possessions down to just what you need and being mobile enough to move around. More recently, my daughter and I started watching NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts together. Taylor Swift in an office corner, sans costumes and theatrics and light-shows and fireworks? Human. Relatable. Equally mind-blowing.
What do pocket-sized notebooks, little free libraries, tiny homes, and tiny desk concerts have in common? Come along on this rabbit trail as we celebrate Tiny and embrace Limits in the creative process.
Tiny is portable and easy.
For awhile, I was carrying an 8”x10” sketchbook. I wanted to try drawing big and filling up the space. But every time I left the house, I had to decide if I wanted to carry something so large and be able to stop for long enough to fill the page. Since then, I have been continuously downsizing my sketchbooks. I started to carry around the small books more consistently, which meant I was more likely to slip in a quick sketch while waiting for my grocery pick-up or even pausing mid-walk to sketch someone’s flowers. Choosing tiny means lowering the barriers and making it easier for yourself when trying something new!
Tiny improves productivity.
As a homeschooling mom, I don’t have the luxury of sitting for hours at my desk or meandering around the city to sketch and paint. Usually, I have as long as my daughter is willing to stay put at a cafe or an event before we have to move along. Or at home, I have the 20 minutes that I am waiting for bread to bake, or the lull between preparing a snack and heading to the library. Tiny pockets of time limit what I am able to do in one sitting, but it’s like having a built-in pomodoro timer - productivity sky-rockets when I am on the clock. Do I wish I had more time? Sure, but accepting my life circumstances in this season has become part of embracing tiny in my creative process.
Tiny limits choice and encourages creative problem-solving.
One of my favourite artists to follow, Koosje Koene, often challenges us to simplify our tools in order to get inspired to try new things. When I’m feeling stuck, I learned from her to just grab 2-3 tools or downsize to a limited palette of 3-6 colours as I head out the door to see what I can sketch with them (see example sketch above). The feeling of creative flow when I get to problem-solve oddly reminds me of some of my experiences growing up around immigrant communities. Our resources were sometimes limited, whether it was our own space to host gatherings or fancy gear and sound equipment. Faced with these and other limits, we improvised with what we had. We got scrappy long before upcycling became trendy. Tiny creates opportunities to improvise and laser-focus on what is most important as we create.
Tiny is delightful!
Who remembers playing Tiny Towers on their first smart phone? Or tamagotchis, the first time around? Or collecting tiny erasers and notebooks and shells? Little things are simply delightful to behold and collect. Here are a few artists I know or whom I follow whose “tiny” works have inspired and stayed with me - my friend Olive in Vancouver did 100 tiny paintings of skies in her “Tiny Expanses” project a few years ago:
Local artist and art teacher Melissa has been doing tiny paintings of birds and other forest-y things recently:
I recently stumbled into creating mini-collage zines as part of my creative process for these newsletters - mostly because it’s fun and delightful! You can see inside some of these zines throughout my newsletter. I strongly believe in making art that brings you joy.
More than ever, tiny is revolutionary.
Tiny is counter-cultural. Tiny is a challenge to the status quo of bigger-and-better. To me, embracing ‘tiny’ calls us to honour the limits of things and of ourselves, to practice having and using less, to be content even in the face of not enough. The limits of ‘tiny’ not only help us towards creativity, they also invite us to experience our humanness.
What can you downsize this week? What tiny might you find delight in? How does tiny affect your approach and your focus?