Makes you wonder how nice it would be if you could be artistic and tuned into the universe, operating as a channel for limitless creativity, absolute freedom and power?

Congratulations! You inner artist is about to be released

We are born creative and it takes very little to reassess that natural state. To make art, all you need to do is to grab a brush and go—really.

The quiet whisper that the artist or poet hears, comes from the inside—it is a feeling, an idea and a complex calculation. But it doesn’t need to be a calculation to be valid, it is okay to have no idea of what is going on, it is okay to be clueless and lost, it is okay to dip a brush in purple or red and just splash the brush on a canvas, just for fun. Is that art? It is the beginning of art and it can go beyond your imagination, but you need to start somewhere, without worrying about the outcome. Loosen up and have fun; let your inner artist take over. Just remember to leave self-importance behind.

Artistic freedom is as important as the freedom of speech. It is the freedom to just be, to revel in the endless possibilities of the moment. Spirituality and creativity is the same thing. The creative flow is your spirit and when you create, your spirit works through you. The creative process enhances, strengthens and celebrates your true essence.

This does not mean that everyone should have a creative profession. It means that you need to make time and space for periodic creative endeavours to bring our your inner artist. Doing so will not only make you feel really good about yourself but also help you remember who you are.

How to bring out your inner artist

Let us understand what you need to do to release your inner artist:

1. Take action

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
— Andy Warhol

Fear of failure stops many people from expressing themselves creatively. The good news is that nobody can fail. It is not a competition. That being said, it is okay to be afraid, uncertain and nervous, but rest assured that there is no goal to reach—all that matters is the action. As we all know, courage is to not the absence of fear, but to prioritise something higher than fear. The action is what is going to nurture your spirit and strengthen your connection to the magnificent you. The feedback from the outer world; praise, sales and a tap on the shoulder, feeds the ego—that is different. Your spirit does not need to prove its talents to the world; it is needless and rejoices in spontaneous expression.

2. Don’t worry about any rules

“Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.”
— Robert Henri

Many artists create extraordinary and unique works, because they are comfortable with their creativity and they trust their hunches. It is difficult to be confident as a beginner, which is why I recommend you to start with loose, abstract, improvised painting. Let yourself go. Be needless of positive feedback from others and allow your spirit to be the source of your strength. Enjoy the feeling of playing with colour, shape and line and be brave enough to enjoy the result as well, as it is one step towards your freedom as an independent and powerful creator.

Preparing to paint

The number one step is to get the supplies and to find a place in your home for your painting activities. You will find the supplies at an art shop. As regards a place for painting, no matter how small a place you live in, you can always make make space. Move around the furniture if you have to.

It is easy to get overwhelmed, insecure and stressed when you walk down the aisles of the art shop as a beginner, but know that the staff is used to helping beginners. Please don’t be afraid to ask for help. Be a proud beginner and feel the excitement instead.

Canvas

Start off with a medium size of the cheapest kind of canvas, there is nothing wrong with them, they are just basic. Do not buy a canvas smaller than 30” x 24” [75 cm x 60 cm]. Please buy two or three canvases, as the need to do another trip to the art shop might delay your second or third painting session.

Palette

Get a standard wooden palette big enough to hold a small chunk of each colour with space in the middle for blending.

Acrylic paints

Start off with student quality acrylics. There are sets of student acrylics that are convenient to start off with. Make sure that you have at least 14 different colours. If you find a set of six or eight basic colours [red, yellow, green, blue] pick additional colours from the shelf. Remember to pick your favourite colour! Maybe you would like to use gold and silver to spice it up.

Ink

In addition to the 14 tubes of acrylic paint, you should get three bottles of drawing ink in the colour of your choice. This will be for pouring and splashing onto the canvas.

Brushes

Get two sets of the art shop’s brand of brushes for acrylics; one set of the biggest brushes and one medium set. You want to have a minimum of 10 brushes, and make sure that at least half of them are big, because the idea is to paint boldly and avoid getting stuck with details.

Clothes, apron and towel

Wear something old and comfortable, and an apron on top. The apron is great because it allows you to feel free to make a bit of a mess. Find an old kitchen towel that you can wipe your brushes and hands on. Now you are all set.

Action time

As you embark on this great adventure, make sure that you have at least two uninterrupted hours to yourself. Play your favourite album, dance a little, and remember three things:

• It cannot go wrong
• Don’t stop, just paint
• Your spirit is behind the wheel.

Take feedback with a handful of salt

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”
­— Charlotte Brontë

Some of us are blessed with open-minded and supportive friends and family, but others are unfortunately surrounded by people who are discouraging. Guard your integrity and refuse to listen to naysayers and skeptics. Only accept positive responses and remember that people’s feedback say more about themselves than anything else.

Welcome to the world of creativity.

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Notes from a travel sketcher

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Two years ago on a trip to Japan, I packed a sketchbook, couple of pens and a watercolour tin in my backpack. The plan was to document my journey slightly differently—the way travellers and world explorers did of their escapades on paper and canvas, before the camera was invented.

In the age of selfie sticks and Go Pro, seeking something that doesn’t offer instant gratification sounded ridiculously archaic to many. “Why bother sketching, when you can click and move on?” they said. I imagined myself sitting for prolonged periods on foreign terrain in inclement weather with people watching [and perhaps judging] me while I scratched lines on paper. What was I getting into?

My debut travel sketch

The voices of detractors and self-doubt were drowned out the moment I cracked open the first page of my travel journal in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen to sketch the sublime cherry blossom. Few hanami revelers picnicking in the garden came over to watch. I was mixing a fragile baby pink to colour the foliage when they peered over my shoulder and showed gracious thumbs up.

Encouraged by their gesture I sketched the lanterns hanging from the trees when they lit up after sundown, the family of four opening their bento boxes and sake bottles, and a white duck waddling out of the pond. And while I did my line work and carefully painted every scene, I was there, encapsulated in the moment, oblivious of time and space. I was observing and creating. Nothing else mattered.

Unbeknownst to me, I had connected with my environment in a primal sort of way. These sketches seem rudimentary today, my drawing skills having improved and all, but when I browse through them I can smell the wind, hear the leaves rustling and feel the blossoms falling at my feet.

It is such an exercise in mindfulness. And when mindful, every sense in the body is so receptive that you feel awake and aware, as if a mist has been lifted. Ever since I started drawing my journeys, I feel I’ve been to places—lived, breathed in and grown roots in the little time I was there and not just passed through them in a haze.

Unbeknownst to me, I had connected with my environment in a primal sort of way

Toiling labourers etched in time

Once while vacationing in Kolkata, I noticed an empty patch in front of my parent’s house being prepped for construction. From our balcony I watched men, thin as rod, brown as earth, working the plot the entire day and sleeping on the hard ground at night under mosquito nets. What I’d seen has long been replaced with a multi-storied building. What I’m left with is a sketch of those men toiling away and a hasty scribble that reads, “Four labourers towing away mud, bricks and debris in their wicker baskets, cleaning the space for a new construction just in front of our house. A heavy downpour seems to have stopped their work for the time being”.

We are exposed to a million things on our travels and daily lives and we weave through them like maniacs, greedy to experience all, making only a handful of memories, of the most extraordinary events. The rest—the everyday, mundane things—fades away with time. My sketch of those labourers captured an ordinary moment in a day gone by, something I would’ve lost had I not made a visual record.

Apparently on 23^rd April 2013 I went on an impromptu date with my husband. We had coffee and dinner at a nice restaurant from where I quickly sketched the windows of the shophouse opposite us. My entry says, “The restaurant was pricey but the evening was priceless. The joy of reliving the ‘ordinary’ is what I find in the pages of my sketchbooks. A Harvard Business School study found that recording the quotidian stuff give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary events. My travel sketchbooks are a testament to that.

When I’m on the road, drawing is also an absolute novel way to come in contact with locals. While in Penang, I was trying to sketch Armenian Street’s iconic red tuk-tuk, but couldn’t progress much because none of them would stay parked for long. As I was about to give up, a tuk-tuk driver, upon seeing my predicament, not only parked his vehicle in front of me, but also declined every tourist that approached him for a ride till I finished my drawing. I was moved beyond words. While sketching Mumbai’s CST station, the man whose shop front I was occupying brought me a chair to sit and iced water to beat the heat. Kindness from strangers is rampant when I’m armed with a sketchbook and has opened avenues for many heartfelt conversations.

An HBS study found that recording the quotidian stuff give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary events

Sue, the owner of a makeshift olive shop at Lyttelton Farmer’s Market near Christchurch told me how she lost her store in the massive 2011 earthquake and had to start all over. She had seen me drawing her table of olives and walked over to chat. The garrulous owner of Indian Palace—an eatery in Singapore shared the struggles and successes of her immigrant life, while I drew her shop. I met Nishiguro at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, and without speaking a word of each other’s language we understood one another perfectly. Using wild hand gestures he told me he’d sold five tunas at the early morning auction. The best part, however, was when he clapped excitedly after I copied his shop’s name in Japanese into my sketch.

Sketching opened many doors for me…literally

Sketching is not intrusive. I haven’t met anyone who felt threatened or offended because I was sketching his or her house, vehicle or pet. On the contrary, I’ve been granted access to places that I wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to see. The Long Bar in Royal Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur denies entry to ladies since the British times. When the old waiter saw me drawing the bar from the threshold, he not only let me in, he showed me around the lovely space and plied me with stories. A Chinese opera group gave me access to their elaborate behind-the-stage make-up session only because I came wielding a sketchbook and pen. Earning people’s trust has been my sketchbook’s greatest gift on my travels.

Recently a friend surprised me with a personal message claiming he likes my travel sketches. I asked him why. After saying, “it’s colourful and fluid in its movements…,” he added something interesting, “…yet leaving space for interpretation.” I love how a drawing can evoke a dialogue between the artist and the viewer. While sketching a destination, I interpret the elements that inspire me and leave the rest. I tell the story of a place a certain way. Another artist drawing the same location may offer a different perspective and the viewer, in turn, may experience something else.

In Hong Kong, the overcrowded cheek by jowl buildings with cables sticking out, washing lines, neon signs and an incredible number of air-conditioning machines fitted on the building facades jumped out at me and my sketchbook is filled with drawings that show this urban chaos. My impressions of Singapore show its rapidly changing streetscape, a potpourri of pre-WW2 shophouses, Art Deco buildings and 21st century high-rises.

British reportage illustrator George Butler said in a TED talk that drawings encapsulate the passage of time. “The 2 – 3 hours on the street observing, watching, witnessing is so important. It’s not just the snap of a shutter and walking away,” he says and I echo his sentiment. Travel sketching, after all, is not an end, but a means to an end. Perhaps this was the gratification I was really after.

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Parasomnia is a disorder characterised by unusual behaviour of the nervous system during sleep. Although it affects millions around the world, there is a stark difference between others and me. While most people perform normal day-to-day tasks in their sleep, I produce art.

You might think that there is nothing unusual about that. Except for the fact that what I produce when I am asleep, I cannot produce in my waking life. Yes, I have never been interested in art and have tried on many occasions to replicate some of my own works but have failed miserably. Some people call it a gift; others say it is a scam.

From scribbles to works of art

I remember most of my childhood as being pleasant and cheerful, and unlike most people I felt in touch with the spiritual side of life. My night-time habit would normally start with me getting out of bed after falling asleep and searching my bedroom looking for my school crayons or pencils. I would then start drawing on the walls of my bedroom or in my school books. In the beginning, my drawings were nothing but scribbles and circles with no real theme or meaning attached to them. This went on for years. But when I reached my teenage years, I started to produce more than just unfathomable doodles—I began to draw what most people now classify as art.

One morning I woke up at a friend’s house and discovered that I had drawn four life-size portraits of the late icon Marilyn Monroe the night before. While everybody else was in shock, I was rather amused at what I had done because up till then all my “work” was just random scribbles. From that moment onwards I have produced hundreds of different pieces of art and continue to do so.

The turning point

It was back in 2006 that my life took a sharp turn. I was trying to raise money for a small cancer hospice in North Wales and decided to exhibit a few of my drawings at my local library. It was a small turnout but nevertheless people enjoyed the evening. A few days later, the local newspaper ran a small story on the event. Following that, I received a call from a TV company from South Korea that was interested to come over to film my art. At first I thought it was a hoax but then I decided to meet them at my parents’ house. True to their word, they turned up and shot for a few hours. In return, I asked them for a donation to the hospice for my time, and they were happy to oblige.

Barely a week had gone by when I received another call, this time from The Sun, one of the leading newspapers in the world. They informed me that they were planning to telecast my story the following day. The next day I received about 80 calls from different media outlets, from TV, news channels magazines to radio stations from all around the world. And that was the moment my life changed for the better.

I went straight down to London to be signed by a management team who looked after some great TV personalities in the UK. They managed to get a few TV companies to do several documentaries on my life, which was great.

Dealing with sceptics

After the sudden success, I went through a period of emotional turmoil as I was accused of being a fraud and a scamster. It felt particularly hurtful given the line of work I was in at the time—of caring for people with terminal illnesses. But in the following years, I quietened most of the sceptics. I underwent a battery of tests at the renowned Edinburgh Sleep Clinic and was also tested by scientists in Japan. They are still baffled about my ability to produce art while asleep even though I can’t create anything when I am awake. Luckily for me, I have my old school reports from primary and secondary school to prove that the highest grade I ever got in art was a “D”!

The art world, however, is a fickle place to be in. Many art critics believe that I am not a real artist but most of the general public believes that I am, and that is what counts in the end. The sad trend in the art field is that most art critics appreciate only the so called “political art” or art with a message. Maybe my art has both?

Continuing my journey

I recently appointed a new manager Kevin Zuchowski-Morrison, owner of London Rise Gallery, a renowned gallery in Croydon, England. Kevin has supported me over the last year and has opened up many doors within the art world. I had my first UK exhibition at his gallery earlier this year which turned out to be a roaring success with a large number of media representatives present. I have also exhibited overseas and was in Hong Kong last year for a few weeks displaying my art for a special promotion on Sleep!

I now put all my energy into my art and help different charities here in England and overseas as well. I believe that no matter what you do in life, if you have enough to give something back to the universe and do your bit to make the world a better place, then you’re privileged.