Art Before Breakfast

A Zillion Ways to be More Creative No Matter How Busy You Are

Danny Gregory

• Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781452140582
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Packed with the signature can-do attitude that makes beloved artist Danny Gregory a creativity guru to thousands across the globe, this unique guide serves up a hearty helping of inspiration. For aspiring artists who want to draw and paint but just can't seem to find time in the day, Gregory offers 5– to 10–minute exercises for every skill level that fit into any schedule—whether on a plane, in a meeting, or at the breakfast table—along with practical instruction on techniques and materials, plus strategies for making work that's exciting, unintimidating, and fulfilling. Filled with Gregory's encouraging words and motivating illustrations, Art Before Breakfast teaches readers how to develop a creative habit and lead a richer life through making art.

You’re doing it. You’re drawing what is right in front of you and y’know what? It looks pretty great.

So now, let’s try pushing a bit further. Time to start discovering how little you actually know about the things that are sitting right in front of you. Making art is going to give you a new clarity about things you can’t even name, like the reflections off the spout of a coffee pot or the details in a toaster’s shadow or the shape of your neighbor’s bedroom drapes.

Abstract? Not really. It’s reality—magical, mysterious, real life.

And you almost missed it in your rush to get to your 8 a.m. conference call.

Let’s draw.

First, polish your reading glasses and put in some eyedrops. We’re going in deep.

Get a slice of toast and carefully draw its outer edge. Now, pick a section of the toast and look for the smallest thing you can see. A divot, a cranny, a crumb. Draw the shape of that teeny thing. Now move slowly to the very next landmark you come across—another crumb, a bump, a crevice.

Draw it.

Now, for the next 10 minutes or so, draw all of the neighboring things you see in the toast, hopping from one to the next, as if you were looking out the window of a jet plane and the toast was Kansas. Work your way slowly across it, drawing every single thing you come across. You don’t need to fill in the entire outline, just a small section of intense observation will do.

Time’s up.

Amazing isn’t it, how much was in there? And more amazing still, how peaceful and calm you feel after focusing so intensely on something you usually just cover over with butter and jam.

Now, forget the carbs and eat the toast. You earned it.

Our eyeballs are bombarded with enormous amounts of data all day long. To deal with all that input, our brains have developed the ability to process this information and break it down into categories.

So instead of saying, “Look, there's a wooden stick thing covered with bark that's about 45 feet high and has 84 branches and 7,612 leaves in 14 shades of green and is lit from the left at a 60-degree angle," we say, “There's a tree."

And we look at a bunch of oaks and elms and birches and say “tree, tree, tree." And then we lump all that information into one thing: forest.

Putting things into pigeonholes saves time. But increasingly, it distances us from reality and we start to live entirely in our heads. Life is an amazing epic 3-D IMAX movie but our brains just want to tweet, “It's about aliens 'n' zombies. Lvd it." Efficient but sad.

Reality isn't neat and tidy and compartmentalizable. It has infinite variations and details, and that's what makes it beautiful.

Making art slows us down enough to see the details, the wrinkles, the world within worlds. Without it, life is just a blur of CliffsNotes, movie trailers, and microwaved entreēs.

Is that really what you want?

“Un disegno dieci minuti di pan tostato è un zilione di volte meglio di un disegno a zero minuto di pan tostato.”*

“The Last Breakfast” by Leonardo da Vinci

Little-known fact: Leonardo painted The Last Supper while the disciples were waiting for the check.

* “A ten-minute drawing of some toast is a zillion times better than a zero-minute drawing of some toast.” And he w...