If art is war, as Steven Pressfield would suggest, then ink is my weapon of choice. This is true even when I’m not writing. Working my way through Lisa Sonora Boom’s The Creative Entrepreneur, a book about developing business ideas through the use of a visual journal, I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling with paint brushes, pencils, crayons, chalk, and charcoal, but the pages I’ve created with colored ink pens are my favorite.
Maybe it’s because it feels so familiar. I’ve essentially been using black ink to draw words in notebooks and journals for several years. Now, I’m using a variety of colors and adding shapes and curves and lines. I love the way the ink gently spills onto the paper as I move my hand, and the way even the simplest doodle stands out on the page.
There’s something about the flow of it all that allows me to flow too. When I’m feeling empty and void of ideas, I find that simply creating abstract forms with a pen somehow breaks something loose inside me. Alternating colors of ink as I write does something similar.
Add some background music and I’m lost – in a good way.
I assume that some people feel this way about painting and others about knitting or whittling or even cutting and pasting.
What’s your weapon of choice? Do you know?
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