# The Busy Creative: 3 Quick & Easy Drawing Exercises to Spark Creativity - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/the-busy-creative-3-quick-and-easy-drawing-exercises-to-spark-creativity/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # The Busy Creative: 3 Quick & Easy Drawing Exercises to Spark Creativity Updated August 2026 Amandine Thomas · Award-winning illustrator All levels · 28 min Three tiny drawing rituals designed to fit inside coffee breaks, not a technique class, but a habit-building nudge for the perpetually depleted. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-busy-creative-3-quick-and-easy-drawing-exercises-to-spark-creativity%2F2051768217) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## What it actually teaches The Busy Creative is not a drawing-skill course, and it does not pretend to be. Amandine Thomas, an illustrator and art director, builds the entire 28 minutes around a single problem: how does a person with almost no spare time keep any kind of creative practice alive. Her answer is a three-tier system of exercises scaled to available minutes. The Quick Bite takes five minutes and uses automatic drawing, a technique borrowed from early 20th century surrealists, where the hand moves freely across the page without the eye guiding it, and a subject is only assigned to the resulting scribble afterward. The Coffee Break takes ten minutes and asks for a themed collection of small doodles, everyday objects like a messy desk or a diaper bag, drawn in quick succession without concern for arrangement. The Lunch Box takes fifteen minutes and turns three randomly generated words, an adjective, a noun, and a verb pulled from a personal 20-item grid, into a fast comic strip. That structure is the course's strongest asset. Each exercise removes a specific obstacle: the blank page, the tyranny of a single subject, and the pressure to invent a concept from scratch. By the time a viewer reaches the third exercise, the escalation in both time and creative demand feels earned rather than arbitrary. ## Where the value sits, and where it thins out The philosophy underneath all three exercises, borrowed from the French phrase about best being the enemy of good, gets repeated often enough that it starts to feel like the actual thesis of the class, more than the drawing itself. That repetition is not padding so much as the point. Thomas is explicit that a messy five-minute sketch counts as a win, and that framing does real work for anyone whose perfectionism has been the actual barrier to picking up a pen. But it also means the class spends a disproportionate amount of its runtime on mindset and time management rather than on drawing mechanics. Viewers hoping for guidance on composition, shading, anatomy, or any technical skill building will find none of that here. Tool recommendations stay deliberately minimal, a small sketchbook and a fine liner, chosen specifically to avoid setup and cleanup time, which suits the course's premise but limits how much visual craft gets demonstrated. The random-prompt system in the Lunch Box lesson is genuinely clever and reusable well past the class itself, since the templates in the resource section let a student regenerate thousands of prompt combinations from a personalized word bank. The class project asks students to complete all three exercises and post them, which is a reasonable, low-stakes ask given the runtime. The Key Takeaways lesson mostly restates the earlier philosophy rather than adding new material, which makes the ending feel slightly thin. ## Bottom line This is a habit-formation class wearing a drawing-class label, and it succeeds at that narrower goal. Anyone whose real obstacle is finding minutes and motivation, not skill, will get a genuinely useful and immediately usable system out of half an hour. Anyone looking to grow as an artist technically should look elsewhere in Thomas's catalog or beyond it. The standout The Quick Bite exercise, an automatic-drawing scribble made without looking at the page, then retroactively interpreted into a subject, removes the blank-page paralysis that stops most beginners before they start. ## What you will learn - · How to run an automatic-drawing warmup (the Quick Bite) that starts with a blind scribble and finds a subject inside it afterward - · How to build a themed doodle collection (the Coffee Break) around one everyday subject, like desk clutter or coffee cups - · How to generate a random three-word prompt from a personal word grid and turn it into a quick comic (the Lunch Box) - · How to identify passive time blocks in a daily schedule and convert them into creative time - · How to set an achievable, low-pressure creative goal instead of an ambitious one that collapses under real life - · How to sustain the habit past week one using streaks, accountability partners, or loose group challenges Best for: Someone who already likes drawing casually but has let the habit lapse under work or caregiving pressure and needs a low-friction way back in. Skip it if: Anyone hoping to improve technical drawing skill, learn anatomy, perspective, or media technique, since the class deliberately avoids all of that in favor of habit formation. Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Audio & Video Quality [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-busy-creative-3-quick-and-easy-drawing-exercises-to-spark-creativity%2F2051768217)