The Importance of Warming Up

Suppose you want to run a 5k race but you haven’t exercised in years, how do you get ready and prepare for it?

The first step is to condition your body on a regular basis so that when the time nears, your body can handle the challenge.

For anything we want to achieve, warming up and conditioning our bodies and minds beforehand is extremely important.

Once you start doing this, you’ll find that it begins to become a habit. You can see and feel yourself getting adjusted and getting stronger.

In order to prepare myself to go into my studio and spend a day devoted to creative thinking and painting I also need to warm up…both my mind and body.

First off, as I travel to my studio – either walk from my house to my backyard studio in New Orleans, or drive 15 minutes from my condo to my studio on Bainbridge Island – I begin preparing my mind to enter a different world.

Walking straight into the studio and beginning painting is impossible for me. I need to transition to that magical mental creative space. My ritual is to sit in my chair, which is surrounded by lots of inspirational books, and pick one to browse through.

It could be a book on being creative, or possibly one of my books on beautiful interior design. (I love seeing the art in people’s houses.) Or I may choose one of the many books I’ve made through the online company Chatbooks. These books are made from images I love on Pinterest so each page is something I’ve chosen and that I know will inspire me.

And my books have themes…colorful landscapes, white landscapes, sculpture, striped paintings, black and white paintings, collage, and many, many more. In all, I think I have about 50 of them by now.

After this transition period, I now feel ready to start doing some warm-up exercises just to get the creative juices flowing. There is no outcome planned other than just playing.

One day I may warm up by mixing lots of blues. Another time it could be experimenting with making as many different marks as I can using only the color black. And maybe another time I just paint one color all over my watercolor paper with organic lines, where later I cut it up and rearrange it. It becomes a construct/deconstruct exercise.

If you’d like to watch me do this exact warm-up exercise using the color red, then you’ll want to watch my YouTube video demonstrating this.

Click HERE if you’d like to see “A Painting Warm-Up Exercise.”

Whatever your habit of conditioning yourself to get warmed up in your painting studio or training for a 5k race, giving yourself that time will help you a get a better outcome. And you’ll be happier in the end.

Sending you a world of love,

Adele

* Click HERE to learn about the Art with Adele Academy.

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