 Creativity is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you will lose it. People often ask me how I manage to stay creative and make art every day despite, you know, life and being bipolar. And the short answer is that I try to treat my creativity as if it was a muscle. That means I try to exercise it daily and I also let it rest when it needs to and balancing it like that makes me almost immune to art block. The core exercise I have in practicing almost daily for over three years now is making ink monsters because it's the perfect low effort way of maintaining both your creative strength and flexibility. Before we start, all the pieces of art you've seen here and in fact all of my art is available for free use so you can download it, you can copy it, you can tattoo it and you can even sell it and if you think that's cool, please consider supporting on Patreon. Now let's go! One way to start making an ink monster is to place an ink drop on my paper and blow on it. Then I stare at the shape and try to freely let it resonate with my mind. I'm not looking for a complete shape, I'm not looking to envision a masterpiece. I'm just looking for a little something that reminds me of something. In this case the two longer lines remind me of the wings of a bird so I start drawing feathers on one of them. Today I knew I wanted to draw something simple and cartoonish so I'm using broad brush strokes to capture the general idea of wings as broadly as possible. I don't worry about the accuracy or anatomy or the kind of bird it's supposed to be, at this point it's just a wing. I decide to draw a long tail on it simply because that seems to contrast with the shape of the wing. Most flying birds do not have especially long tails and this stumpy wing combined with the longer tail seems somehow silly to me. Having the belly of the bird white better allows for the cartoony style, although I could just as well have chosen to do the whole creature as a silhouette. Originally I thought the other long ink line would be another wing but now it clearly seems like a long neck. Some feathers out the back of the head seem fitting and that also seems to call for a long beak. This is the first point of the drawing where I actually have to worry about my line quality. Making the lines on the top towards the light thinner and the lines in shadow thicker. It is also at this point I notice I'm basically just ripping off the woodpecker from the old Donald Duck birdwatcher cartoon and that's okay. That was one of the most important cartoons for me as a kid and the whole family loved it so much. In Norway we used to watch Disney's Christmas cavalcade each yuletide and it was always a highlight when the birdwatcher was one of the random cartoons inserted between the Christmas regulars. It is perhaps because of these memories I do my best cartoony eyes for my monster bird. Here I decide to draw a second wing in order to make the bird appear more three-dimensional but I actually mess it up. I forget to leave a little gap between the beak and the wing and also let the wing continue on beyond the beak. Therefore I create a tangent that's going to be hard on the eye. Luckily I managed to catch it after the camera's turned off after I've signed the piece but you know the way I work I always catch a few mistakes after I think I'm done. For the legs I decide that the bird should have its prey clutched in its claws and that's when the monstrousness and the story hits me. Now before we finish this drawing and accidentally solve a modern mystery in the process please remember to subscribe and press the bell icon and why not leave a comment as well. You can save your life for drawing or what types of videos you would like to see in the future. So anyhow let's solve a mystery. Up until now I've just been drawing a silly looking bird but by making it hold on to something big I can suddenly imply that the bird is humongous gargantuan even and what's bigger than an ocean liner? Well many things are actually bigger than ocean liners but for a stupid looking bird it's pretty damn big but what's the story? Why is a bird preying on boats? Where does it hunt? Over the ocean of course and where do ships disappear? The Bermuda Triangle of course and like that what started just with an ink blot is becoming a superbly silly solution to a modern mystery. Ships and planes have disappeared around the Bermuda Triangle because it's the hunting ground for the terrifying Bermuda bird. Is there already a bird called the Bermuda bird? I don't know and I'm not going to google it because I love coming up with names with alliterations. Bermuda bird just sounds good. As I finish up this drawing the timer says around five minutes from conception to completion and there's no worry involved. I'm not trying to create a masterpiece. I'm not expressing something deep. I'm simply playing around with ink without expectation and seeing what comes naturally. Letting my mind uncritically engage in fantasy and my hand practice the craft of inking with a brush. You can do this exercise with whatever you want, ink, pencils, ballpoint pen, crayons, sticks and stones or lines in the sand. The theme can also be whatever you want it to be but monsters are ideal because monsters put a very specific framework around what you're drawing and at the same time they can also be whatever you want them to be. In Guy de Maupassant's short story Who Knows the monsters are living furniture and in Stephen King's Christine it's a car and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein who is the true monster but us human kind. Ink monsters or random doodle monsters can be as complex as you want but they can also be as easy as placing two eyes on a random scribble and giving it a name. Therefore they are the ideal exercise for daily maintaining your creative strength and flexibility while keeping your hand warm. The muse is a fickle mistress and no artist can expect to be inspired all the time but by practicing daily even just for five minutes you can be sure that when you need to draw, when you need to get ideas, when you need to be creative, you can do it. You are ready. And now that we're done with the great Bermuda bird why not check out the video where I saw the mystery of Bahamut, Bahamut and Behamut.