Want a Stronger Imagination?

Whether you’re an artist or not, the “Inktober” or “Drawlloween” popular challenges for the month of October might be helpful for you. For each day of the month, you commit to making a drawing inspired by a prompt. If you have no interest in drawing or improving your drawing skills, you can still apply this month’s spooky inspiration in other ways. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and there are plenty of other creative challenges for each month of the year. You might not decide to participate in any of these as they stand, but creating a daily habit of doing something creative will improve your non-art skills overall and help you hone some discipline.

Try challenging yourself this month to just sit with your thoughts and daydreams for five minutes every day. Maybe give yourself a pre-determined set of prompts. Maybe take the Inktober prompts and just try to imagine what you might draw, if you had the perfect ability to put your imagination onto paper. Flexing your skills of imagination, even if not your fine motor skills, is beneficial in so many ways.

Imagination and empathy (you can strengthen this simply by considering how you would go about making your imagined artwork and how others might interpret it when looking at it) are vital for every aspect of being a person! This flexibility will help you to improve your ability to come up with ideas, your resourcefulness, and even your communication skills.

The Inktober prompt for October 2 is “spiders.” Try contemplating something spooky in honor of Halloween today, just to see how it feels. By the end of the month, you might have a slew of new ideas ready to apply to other parts of your life!