Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon | Book Review

If you’ve missed my intro posts and haven’t read my about me just to catch you up I love books. I love to read and one of my favourite ways to do the whole ‘self-care’ thing is losing myself in a book.

Travelling to a different world and forgetting about the real world for an hour or two is just the best. As you may expect because of this I’m a big fan of fiction, in particular Young Adult fiction and Fantasy fiction. Non-fiction books aren’t my favourite, however, I’m doing my best to change that and I think I’ve found a new route of books that are making me like it again. 

Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon is one of these books. The thing that I struggle with about non-fiction creative books like this is you can’t just sit down and consume the whole thing like you could with a novel. These creative inspiration books have a lot of content, they have a lot of advice and guidance and that takes time to digest. They take a while to read as you can’t read them all in one go, you need to take breaks to digest the information. This is all new for me.

“Your creative voice is your superpower”
- Lisa Congdon

Find Your Artistic Voice is set out in sections, seven sections talking about the what, why, and eventually how you can discover your artistic voice. Lisa’s words of inspiration and guidance are split up with interviews with other artists. I began the book actually disliking these as I was struggling with taking in all these different points of view, thinking that I instead wanted just a book of Lisa’s thoughts. However, further through the book my view changed, I was actually enjoying these fresh takes from different artists giving different views on what an artistic voice actually is. 

“Eighty percent of the work as an artist is showing up”
- Libby Black

One of my markers on whether or not a creative advice type book is good or not is whether it makes me want to put it down and create. Is the author giving me enough inspiration and guidance that I actually want to stop reading and start pursuing a new project? The answer for this book is yes! 

Obviously from picking up this book one of my main goals was getting closer to nailing what my artistic voice actually was. One of the exercises I took away from this was the creative family tree method by Kate Bingaman-Burt. Her idea was that once you map out your creative family tree you’re one step closer to figuring out your voice, “the more branches your creative family tree has, the more unique your voice is going to be.” Sit down and map out all the various interests you have, from certain styles of illustration to your favourite movie, from a particular point in history that interests you to weird stories from when you were a kid. “You put all these through your own filter and make a crazy, weird, custom smoothie blend through your art.” 

“Your artistic voice is not so much style as it is heart.”
- Fin Lee

The main takeaway that is pretty obvious, and stated in a lot of these types of creative advice books, is just to keep making. Show up and create. I’ve been feeling personally in a bit of a creative rut recently so I want to branch out my creativity. I’m actually going to make myself a challenge throughout April to create for at least 15 minutes a day and post whatever I make onto my Instagram stories. This doesn’t necessarily have to be lettering or illustration, it can be watercolour, photography, learning a new skill. As long as I’m being creative it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, as long as it’s not scrolling Instagram. There’s going to be a lot of work in progress, and of course, I don’t have to stop after the 15 minutes but it’s a challenge to hopefully pull me out of my creative rut and get some sparks flying again. Make sure you follow my Instagram to see how it goes!

Get out there. Get creative. And have a read of Find Your Artistic Voice, I recommend it!

- Sophie

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