An Object Self Portrait

Every Tuesday, I post an art prompt to spark a little bit of inspiration for your creativity. These posts are versatile and can be applied to a variety of creative mediums. Whether you enjoy digital art or acrylic painting (or anything in between like tags, mixed media, collage, etc), these fun prompts will help you generate ideas for a new project, or maybe add a fun spin to a current project.

For this week, we are going to use the idea of the object self-portrait as our inspiration.

The Prompt: Use the statement "if I were a thing, I would be this" as inspiration for creating an art piece. Instead of drawing a face, choose one object that stands in for you — and make its portrait. It could be a lantern, a chipped teacup somebody kept anyway, a key to a house that no longer stands, a music box that only plays when the room is empty, a pair of well-used scissors, a paper map gone soft at the folds. It doesn't have to be flattering and it doesn't have to be pretty. It only has to be true. Let your interpretation lead you. Make sure your artwork treats the object like a portrait subject — centered, lit, given presence, the way you'd pose a person — and for a creative twist, include one small detail that proves it has a history: a hairline crack, a worn spot, a repair, a missing piece, something faded by handling.

This prompt is for any art medium or style.

My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!

For more inspiration, here is a digital art piece I created with this prompt.

If I were a thing, I think I would be an art journal.

Not a pristine one waiting carefully on a shelf, too beautiful to touch. I would be the well-loved kind—the one swollen twice its original size because someone kept adding just one more thing.

My pages would be stained with coffee and watercolor. There would be paint beneath my fingernails, if journals had fingernails. Ribbons would trail from my binding. Flowers would be pressed between my pages beside photographs, unfinished poems, ticket stubs, midnight thoughts, grocery lists, tiny drawings, and words written furiously before they had the chance to disappear.

Some pages would be beautiful.

Some would be an absolute mess.

Some would contain things I once believed with my whole heart and no longer believe at all.

And I wouldn't tear those pages out.

They would belong there too.

My spine would be worn from being opened a thousand times. My corners would curl. Something would inevitably be held together with tape. There would be evidence everywhere that I had been handled—that I had traveled, changed, survived, collected things, lost things, loved things, and kept becoming.

I wouldn't want to be a journal with empty pages preserved perfectly.

I'd rather be overflowing.

Well-loved.

Well-filled.

Well-expressed.

A little battered around the edges and absolutely bursting with evidence that I had been here.

Because maybe that's what I want from my life, too.

Not perfection.

Proof that I used the pages. ♡