Condensed Polytechnicast transcript - Making your own prompts to journal about your art

What follows is a condensed, edited and expanded transcript from my art journal podcast, The Polytechnicast. These are excerpts from the Making your own prompts to journal about your art episode.

I'm skipping past the intro sections, a partial history of the Art Soundoff creative challenge and jumping to the thoughts about generating journal prompts.

Art Soundoff celebrates journaling about your art.

Jerzy Drozd and I created art soundoff to practice and celebrate art journaling together with a community. We tried to provide a flexible way of going about art sound off, which is to say, well practice the whole idea of podcasting, use, verbal reflection, and inquisition to explore the stuff you're going through as a creator, and things you've gone through in the past, right now are about to do.

The Art Soundoff prompts

And well, we put up all kinds of we did a few iterations on the project and tried to, I think, the latest one, that we updated the site in 2019.

1. Introductions
2. Notebooks
3. Challenges
4. What are you playing?
5. Reactions/community
6. Favorite tool
7. Beginning
8. Influence/inspiration
9. Pitch your own product or service
10. Latest drawing
11. What are you learning?
12. Food
13. 3 things about your art
14. Friction/stuck
15. Unstuck
16. What are you watching?
17. Journal what worked/what didn't
18. Characters
19. Time
20. Pens/pencils
21. Sharing
22. WIP (work in progress)
23. Empathy
24. Journal hi-fives & gratitude
25. What are you reading?
26. Humor
27. Sleep
28. Outlets
29. Why do you make art?
30. How did Art Soundoff

Plus optionally using this daily flow for November: record, share/post if you wish, explore what others are sharing.

Find your own definition and framing for the journaling

Jerzy and I started the challenge because we find it fun to both make art journals and to also learn from other artists journaling.

If you do the thing, right, hit record, think of a question. Consider your experience. Go through the motions of verbalizing and facing what you just verbalized. That is a practice.

What if you are listening to this and thinking, Well, I'd like to do this thing. I'd like to do this creative challenge or I'm at least considering it. I have a lot of thoughts about creative challenges. I've overall find them nourishing, and sometimes difficult or frustrating or like the outcomes vary. And I've, in my experience, if I have thought about a thing enough to say, what do I want to have as a result of this? And what is the what do I want it to be like for me as I'm going about bringing this result into existence?

Generate your prompts ideas list

• Ask: what's mattering to me? How can and then feed that? stuff? Like, go to your social timeline on any network and start noticing what's important? What do you react to what relates to your creativity.
• And/or look at the existing art soundoff prompts (see above or go to leanintoart.com/artsoundoff. And say, This one works, this one doesn't. Also as you go through: and let any ideas fall out of your head and write them down. Any prompt you like or dislike is a chance to ask yourself why and make your response into a prompt.

Ask what outcomes do you want to see from journaling?

• Particular results/output? Are you drafting a book? Connecting with your community? Journaling to remember to reflect on later?
• Experiences? Looking to have it be particularly approachable or significantly challenging?

Filter your prompts list

• Which prompts fit the kind of output you want?
• Which ones do you feel ready and have a lot to say?
• Which ones give you impression it would be a tough topic and why?
• How many prompts do you need? Do you need to prune your list more?
• Do you have better ideas now you've thought about this more? Trade out earlier draft prompts for your new more fitting ones.

And now you've gone through and done a generative and list refinement exercise. You have your list of what you want to journal about. It's about what's important to you, and why, and, and how and all that kind of stuff. And if, if you still aren't quite getting to that, that full list, start using those classic questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how, on any of the items on the list that you have generated.

A helpful resource: you could take my class Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge

I have a whole workshop about this situation, the creative challenge aspect. As a person who likes the spark and community around creative challenges, I've done a bunch over the past 12 years. That plus game and UX design led me to create an approach to make creative challenges work and fit for me, the me I am right now. Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge will help you create your own recipe that suits you to get the outcome and experience you want to have. You can take the class through my Gumroad store or on Skillshare.

Consider if a public or private art journal works best for you.

Try to find a place to share where this will be nourishing for you. If you're doing like, deep, thoughtful, vulnerable reflection and analysis on your own experience and practice, well, or projects. Put that somewhere that feels like a safe place. So maybe it's a discord you belong to maybe it's a public web presence, or public presence of some sort, or your own RSS feed on a blog, because you're super old school.

Your journal recordings can become text to search and share.

You can always turn that into text via different service services. One that I use a lot is Otter.ai Note that's a referral link, I don't do many of those but am a happy customer of that service. It's pretty good for turning your audio into text.

Once you have a text version of your journal it's easy to search. The journals themselves can become rough drafts for other writing or rough notes to feed other creative work.

Note this article I transcribed via Otter, then edited, condensed, and added things I thought would make a more helpful article. The word count at the start was 2,841. After trimming and adding a little after it lands at about 1,130 words. Still verbose as that's how I perform the Polytechnicast but much more approachable for readers given the trimming, structure, and headings.

Closing

All right. There's some thoughts, encouragement, little bit of caution, and hopefully some helpful tools for your art journaling. If you're if you're going to do some art journal recording, I wish you luck, and I hope you find fun constraints and useful prompts.