Making Time For Small Bits of Magic (and For Getting Inspired) —

We hurry too much. We rush through our days, busy busy busy. But when we rush, we are missing so much of what makes life worth living. We miss all the small but exquisite bits of magic . . .

A Video Post, by Sebastian Michaels

Transcript continued:

I’m going to encourage you to deliberately SLOW DOWN and try not to miss them. Even if only a few times a day. Just slow. Just slow.

For me, so far today, some of those small moments were:

• Quietly and very deliberately making the finest cup of hot cocoa ever. Then savoring it while watching the sun rise over the mountains.
• Reading Seneca … my legs propped up and one of my cats on my lap, taking a few minutes just to pet and admire her.
• Walking outdoors in the brisk morning chill (putting out bird seed), breathing in the mountain air, while listening to the amazing voice of Ray LaMontagne filling my headphones while the sunlight poured through the trees.

Which of these moments might have been missed (or minimized) had I rushed through them on my way to something else, without stopping a moment to breathe them in and really be there … GRATEFUL for being there?

Take time in your day to CHERISH moments of your day.

Take time in your day to CHERISH the moments you have with those you love.

Find the small magics.

And look for one or two you might capture with a quick photo and carry into your artwork … where you can capture that fleeting miracle, and make it forever safe by putting it to canvas.

Then, after you’ve really savored those moments and created a photo to preserve it forever … now go use these to inspire your next work. While it’s fresh in your heart and mind. Just take them and jump into a new canvas with both feet.

You don’t need to start out inspired. (Though I suspect you will be.) Inspired or not, just start. Trust me. What you just experienced will be there, and it will inform the work you are about to create.

It’s surprising to me how often inspiration comes AFTER you start. You don’t necessarily need to sit down inspired. You just need to sit down. You don’t have to know where a piece is going when you begin. You just have to begin.

Of course, that said, you do want to be jotting down ideas or dreaming up compositions when you’re not at your computer. That’s part of being an artist: you should be trying out ideas in your head all the time. And if you can bring those ideas back to your computer with you (along with some photos you grabbed expressly for the purpose of creating the piece you dreamed up in your head), all the better.

You want to be pursuing that kind of deliberate art as well.

But more often, I suspect, you will find yourself sitting down to create, and you will simply begin by flipping through your photo library, grabbing something that catches your fancy, and just seeing where it takes you.

Simplest way to jumpstart one of those sessions: Get something (anything) on the canvas. Once something is on the canvas, you have something you can start moving around, something you can add to and begin shaping.

Start with a texture or two, grab those photos you just captured, duplicate one of the photo layers and give it a blend mode, add a layer mask, add a second texture . . .

Get just that far, and you are IN it. The world falls away.

And it’s a whole other kind of magic taking shape before you.

– Sebastian