Your Weekly Creative Practice · Week 3
Let inspiration lead. Then make something.
Your five-minute practice starts here — every Sunday. Drop in any week — each practice stands on its own.
Each Sunday, we share one simple creative exercise. No experience required. No pressure to be good.
This is Week 3.
Something unexpected happened this week.
Blythe was in NYC — a workshop in the morning for a group of branding executives, and then, because we can’t help ourselves, Chelsea galleries in the afternoon.
We were walking down 25th Street when a single word on a gallery sign stopped us in our tracks: Vuillard.
Not something we expected to find in the heart of the contemporary art district, so we ducked into Skarstedt Gallery and found ourselves face to face with a rare trove of Vuillard’s early paintings. They were on loan from museums and private collections around the world — all from a pivotal period of his career, roughly 1890 to 1905. We were not prepared for how good it was.
What floored us: the color combinations. Deep murky greens and blacks, muted colors, unexpected combinations, and some shocks of vivid color. Unexpected harmonies that felt electric in some paintings and quietly hypnotic in others. The compositions — wallpaper merging into fabric merging into a figure until you couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. Some paintings looked almost abstract at first, and you had to look closely before the scene revealed itself.
That tension between the abstract and the recognizable is what makes the work so alive.
Standing there, we kept asking ourselves: why does this move us so much?
And that question — the one you ask when something stops you — is exactly where a creative practice begins.
WEEK 3 · LET INSPIRATION LEAD
The next morning, inspired by a painting in the show, I sat down with markers and a blank piece of paper. Total time: under 10 minutes.
Step 1 · Color combinations (~3 minutes)
I wasn’t trying to copy the colors in the painting. I was chasing the feeling — the specific colors that had stayed with me. I made small blocks of color pairs and trios, following my intuition. Almost immediately, curiosity took over: What if I pushed this warmer? What if I added pink? That wondering is the practice. I ended up in directions I hadn’t planned.
Step 2 · Pattern play (~5 minutes)
Then I decided to try pattern. Still not copying — just letting the hand follow where intuition guided. No plan. No rules. Just marks and movement. I tried not to focus on outcome and just enjoy the process.
When I finished, I felt calmer. More awake. On the walk to get coffee that morning, I kept noticing color combinations everywhere — a teal storefront against a mossy awning, rust brick against slate sky.
The real result of this kind of practice is that it changes how you see.
THE PRACTICE
Find something this week that moves you — a painting, a song, a stranger’s outfit, a color combination in a coffee shop window. Anything that makes you stop and think why do I love that?
Then spend 5 minutes making something from your answer. Color combinations, a doodle, marks on a page — it doesn’t matter. Follow what you loved and see where it leads.
The outcome is not the point. The noticing is.
TRY THIS
Start with just two colors that excited you. Make ten different combinations using only those two — vary the proportions, the order, the saturation. Notice how much changes with so little.
SHARE WITH US
What stopped you this week — what made you look twice? Drop it in the comments. We genuinely want to know.
Inspiration is everywhere. The practice is learning to catch it before it passes.
Five minutes is enough to begin.
xo Mallory