John Donohue’s Daily 10-Minute Creative Exercise Is to Draw Ducks and Dish Racks. Here’s How It Helps Bust Through Creative Blocks
John Donohue has created a daily creative routine that helps ground him in the factual, remove hesitation, and create fearlessly. Photo by Gus Powell. Images courtesy of Donohue.
In “Creative Exercises,” we share tools to solve creative problems or stoke the creative fires. Do these creative exercises by yourself or with your team in under 30 minutes and with minimal supplies. Go!
Every morning, before John Donohue gets to his Brooklyn studio, he’s already completed his first drawing of the day. It is the same thing he drew yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that: a small wind-up duck that sits on his living room table.
It makes for a routine that is seemingly ridiculous and deceptively simple. So why does he do it? Well, because these are the non-verbal parts of his day when he becomes really present. When he draws, it’s like he clears his head — kind of like a mental detox. But unlike his signature restaurant drawings, these pieces are entirely for himself.
But wait, there’s more. If the ducks are his warm-up, then the evening dish racks are the cool-down. That’s right — every day for seven years now, Donohue has been drawing the good old-fashioned appliance we all use to set our dishes out to dry. By now, he’s made thousands of renditions of it. And he never tires of it, because the accomplishment lies in the simple act of doing the thing. “The success metric, if there even is one, is that you did it,” he says. “That’s your KPI.”
These two daily creative exercises set Donohue on the path to do what he loves: draw the things he sees. Here, he shares the six steps for completing these 10-minute daily creative exercises, which help him to bust through creative blocks and get to the stuff he loves.
Donohue's dish rack is like stepping into a river — the same, but also changing constantly.
I. Choose a time and place that will stay consistent every time you do your exercise.
I’ve deliberately made the process easy for myself. I never have to wonder, Oh, what am I going to draw today? because I’ve taken that part out of the equation. So I get up very early, at five or six o'clock in the morning, and I draw this wind-up duck that my wife has. It’s kind of crazy to do basically the same drawing every day, but it’s like that maxim, “You can never step into the same river twice.” So I guess the thing about it is that it’s the same object, but it's really never the same. That duck is always sitting there, that dish rack is on the counter, but the river is changing constantly.
II. No phones allowed. Don’t even think about having your phone around when you do this.
I put my phone on airplane mode when I go to sleep at night, and when I wake up, I don’t turn my phone on again until I’ve done a drawing. For me, this process is really about just calming down and getting present as a creative person. So not turning the phone on is really instrumental, because the phone is so powerful in its ability to rob our attention from us.
III. Find an exercise that keeps you coming back to it.
The key to creating a process like this is to find something that’s inherently rewarding to you, meaning, the practice of it. So maybe your thing is golf, and you’re practicing your swing. If you’re only concerned about how far the ball is going to go, or where it’ll end up, then you’re too focused on the “results” part of the process. That’s probably not what is going to be helpful, because the thing itself has to be rewarding. You need to choose the thing that you want to do again and again — the thing that makes you go, Oh, that feels good.
For me, I work in ink on paper, and when I put something down, it’s very liberating, because it’s like everything is a mistake to begin with. It’s the same with my running; sometimes it’s really hard to start a run, but then afterwards I feel way better. These practices have this positive feedback loop.
It can take just 10 minutes to do something entirely for you.
IV. Don’t do too much — this isn’t meant to be your masterpiece.
The other day, after I finished the dish rack, I felt like I needed a little bit more. So I turned around and I drew the stove and there was a kettle on it. And I was like, All right, this is going to be a disaster, but I’m going to go for it. I started getting carried away with it, doing some shading and stuff. And then I realized what I was doing, and I put down the pen to stop myself from going farther. Perfection is not the point of this exercise. Knowing when to stop is a big important part of life and being an artist.
Donohue affixes an aphorism to most drawings, like Yes, that was so worth it! or You might have to look more than once to see clearly.
V. Take in the final result, but don’t judge it.
You have to be careful about judging the output. For me, that means acknowledging that there will always be a “perception gap” between what I’m really seeing and what I’m able to capture in my drawing. At the end, there’s always going to be an assessment — you can’t help but look at your end result and think something of it, right? But I would maybe be careful about that. Certainly do not let it stop you from doing it.
VI. Remember, you are creating for yourself. This one is entirely for you.
Lastly, it takes great courage to do these things. I often hear artists talk about how they don’t even get to do any drawing for themselves, like they don’t have the time to stop to do something beneficial for themselves. It takes a weird amount of courage to do something beneficial for oneself, right? A lot of times we’re just meeting the expectations of others or doing things out of habit. For me, I’m just at an age where it’s hard to not do something when I know that I benefit from it. I’m “old enough to know better,” right?
The Takeaways:
Here is how you can do this in only 10 minutes a day.
I. Choose a time and place that will stay consistent every time you do your exercise.
II. No phones allowed. Don’t even think about having your phone around when you do this.
III. Find an exercise that keeps you coming back to it.
IV. Don’t do too much — this isn’t meant to be your masterpiece.
V. Take in the final result, but don’t judge it.
VI. Remember, you are creating for yourself. This one is entirely for you.
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