Let me introduce to you my first books on Amazon: The Creative Project Planner

The idea for this project planner came about when I was thinking of a project to do for Laura Jane Illustration’s Amazon KDP course. I wanted to create a planner but was struggling to think of how I could create something unique.

One of the exercises that I went through to come up with ideas was I started to think about some of my processes and how I plan things. At the time, I was taking part in a design challenge on Instagram.. This particular challenge had some prompts that kind of stumped me so I really had to dig deep inside my creative brain to come up with ideas.

In the past, my approach to creating things for art challenges has been to:

Write down a bunch of ideas that come to mind when I think of the prompt. This is basically anything associated with any word of the prompt or any memory that I associate with the prompt.
Then, I narrow things down to a couple of possible ideas to proceed with.
From there, I sketch out some rough thumbnails to layout ideas before taking everything to my iPad to do a more refined sketch in Procreate.

Up to this point, I do all of this in my bulky, hardcover sketchbook - on one side of the sketchbook I write out ideas and the other side I use for my sketches.

Now, I’m not gonna lie, I do love having a hard covered sketchbook. The problem with the sketchbook that I use and have been using is it’s not very travel friendly. I spend part of the year in Canada and part of the year in Mexico so having something that’s not big and bulky, and that I won’t struggle to fit in my carry-on suitcase is very important to me.

Another thought that I had while coming up for this project planner idea were some of the struggles that some creatives have when it comes to creating new pieces of art. One issue was the habit of starting a lot of projects but not finishing them. Another issue that I know is often a struggle is creative block.

In The Creative Project Planner, there is a plan of action section to write out do-able steps but also put a deadline or date to make sure it gets done. At the beginning of the project planner, I also added a list of design themes to help creatives with ideas for coming up with a possible design.

Here’s a quick peek at The Creative Project Planner