Stick to It: How to Maintain a Creative Practice
Amarilys Henderson · Watercolor Illustrator, Design Thinker
A 32-minute pep talk on finishing creative challenges, useful for the mindset but thin on any real skill-building.
"Stick to It" is not a painting class wearing a habit-building disguise, and not quite the reverse either. It sits in an odd middle position: roughly twenty minutes of talk about sustaining a creative challenge, followed by a faster tour through the watercolor and ink pieces made during that talk. Amarilys Henderson frames the whole thing around one origin story, a podcast host once asked her how she keeps up daily sketch challenges, and the class is her expanded answer.
The habit-building core
The teaching sequence is tight and sensible. Start with a challenge scoped to two parameters, not more (her example: everyday objects, in line drawing, every day). Attach a "so that" statement, the real reason behind the goal, because that sentence is what gets revisited on the days motivation runs out. Then calibrate the challenge to how you actually work, whether that means needing a prompt every day, wanting total freedom, or landing somewhere in between. None of this is groundbreaking as psychology, but it is stated with enough specificity, her own 100-days-of-color project mutating into "color birds" partway through, her subway-sketching example widening to the walk to work when it got stale, that it reads as earned advice rather than a listicle.
The most useful stretch is the section on the halfway slump. Henderson names the exact moment most people quit: the point where you look back at how far you've come and realize that's also how far you have left to go. Her fix isn't willpower, it's redesign. Add a dimension, loosen a restriction, find a new angle on the same "why." That reframe, treat the flagging feeling as a design problem rather than a discipline failure, is the one idea in the class that could genuinely change how someone runs their next challenge.
The busy-and-tired advice is more common sense than insight: make something quick and bad rather than nothing at all, and keep a backup low-effort version of the challenge ready for predictable busy seasons like holidays. It's fine, practical, and forgettable.
Where it thins out
The back half, five short segments walking through florals, line drawings, faces, and abstract mark-making, functions as a highlight reel rather than instruction. Brush choices get named (a size four outliner, a dry one-inch flat brush for texture), and a couple of real techniques surface, wet-into-wet water drops, using a blotted-and-relayered line to fix a jawline that came out too short, but each demo moves on before the technique is actually taught. Someone hoping to learn watercolor faces or floral washes from this class will finish still not knowing how to mix a skin tone or build a wash from scratch. These segments work only as a behind-the-scenes bonus for people who already paint and want to see her process, not as a tutorial.
The class also never engages with why some people fail at accountability structures altogether, its "rally your tribe" advice is essentially "post about it and ask a friend to check in," which undersells how much friction real accountability requires. As a short, focused nudge toward finishing what you start, it does its job. As a painting class, it's an afterthought bolted onto the end.
The standout
The halfway-point pivot advice, recrafting an over-restrictive challenge (like widening subway sketches to include the walk to work) instead of abandoning it, is the one idea worth the whole class.
What you will learn
- How to scope a personal creative challenge to two clear parameters instead of an open-ended goal
- How to write a 'so that' statement that defines the actual reason behind the challenge
- How to match the challenge structure to your own working style, from prompt-driven to loose and unstructured
- What to do on tired or busy days so a single missed session doesn't kill the streak
- How to recognize and push through the halfway slump by adjusting the challenge's scope rather than quitting
- How to close out a finished challenge with a recap and decide when to start the next one
Best for: Artists already sketching or painting regularly who have quit a 100-day or daily-practice challenge before and want a framework to make the next one stick.
Skip it if: Anyone hoping to learn watercolor, ink, or drawing technique from scratch, since the demo segments assume existing skill and move through techniques quickly with no step-by-step instruction.