A Year of Artist Dates
Planning a Year of Artist Dates
What would it feel like to give your creativity a little more room to breathe this year?
This resource is an invitation to plan ahead for your inner artist—to make space for curiosity, beauty, and attention before the year fills up. With a little intentionality, even small pockets of time can become meaningful touchstones that nourish your creative life.
What Is an Artist Date?
An artist date doesn’t have to be extravagant or time-consuming. Often, it’s simply an hour you’ve reclaimed from the spin cycle of school pickups and grocery lists. It’s a moment that’s just for you in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day.
My favorite artist dates are simple, accessible, and free. I love to wander into my local greenhouse in the dead of winter, drift through an art museum just to say hello to my favorite painting, or sit in a tiny chapel on campus to watch the world go by through diamond-paned windows.
These moments don’t ask anything of me. Their purpose is restoration. Julia Cameron famously called these experiences “Artist Dates,” describing them as time set aside to refill the creative well and signal to your inner artist that she is valued. You might also think of them as field trips for the soul—small, intentional adventures that help you return to your life feeling more like yourself.
Even a short stretch of time spent in a sensory-rich environment can steady the spirit, quiet the mind, and gently reawaken curiosity. And when these moments are planned in advance, they’re far more likely to happen.
The Three Sisters: A Way to Think About Balance
As you begin imagining a year of artist dates, it can be helpful to think in terms of balance.
In many Indigenous planting traditions, the “Three Sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—are grown together. Each plant supports the others: one offers structure, another enriches the soil, another spreads wide to protect what’s growing beneath. Together, they create a resilient, nourishing ecosystem.
Your creative life works much the same way. A thriving year isn’t built on one kind of experience alone, but on the interplay between replenishment, growth, and expression.
As you plan, consider which of these companions already grow easily in your creative landscape—and which might be asking for more care.
Nurture: Soul-nourishing experiences that restore you and refill the well from which creativity draws.
Cultivate: Opportunities to strengthen your craft, stretch your skills, and tend your creative capacities.
Create: Time to express yourself from a place of abundance—entering flow, playing, and enjoying the act of making.
You don’t need equal amounts of each. Instead, notice what feels abundant and what feels scarce.
Your Current Creative Climate
Before you plan further, take a moment to reflect on the climate of your life right now.
What space, time, and energy are genuinely available in this season?
What constraints—visible or invisible—shape what’s possible for you?
Holding these realities with honesty and compassion will help you plan artist dates that feel supportive rather than aspirational.
Let the Words Lead
As you brainstorm ideas, let the following words act as gentle guides. Allow them to spark images, memories, or longings. Notice which words feel comforting, which feel challenging, and which quietly light you up.
Nurture
restore · behold · nest · honor
What experiences help you soften and settle? Where do you long to witness beauty without needing to respond? What helps your body and spirit feel safe enough to rest?
Cultivate
stretch · explore · connect · tend
Where are you ready to grow? What edges of your curiosity feel just beyond reach in a good way? What practices might benefit from steady, patient care?
Create
wander · play · anchor · gather
When do you feel most free to make without overthinking? What environments invite delight or flow? What helps you collect fragments that later become something meaningful?
Return to these words as you plan. Let them help you notice if one area is being overfed while another is being overlooked.
Twenty Artist Date Ideas
Below is a collection of artist dates you can draw from as you plan your year. Shorten them, soften them, or swap them to fit your life.
Nurture
Visit a greenhouse or conservatory and linger with one plant that captures your attention.
Sit in a chapel, library, or other hushed public space and freewrite without an agenda.
Take a solitary walk through a familiar neighborhood with your phone on airplane mode.
Drive aimlessly for a while with music that makes you feel most like yourself.
Take yourself on a solo coffee or tea date with a notebook and no expectations to produce.
Visit a body of water and sit long enough for your breathing to match its rhythm.
Create a small ritual at home—lighting a candle, playing music, making a space just for you.
Cultivate
Explore a local hiking trail, reservoir, or stream, pausing to observe or sketch.
Attend a performance, lecture, or reading outside your usual creative discipline.
Spend time in a bookstore pulling books purely by intuition.
Try a beginner-level class or workshop in a medium you don’t normally use.
Study the work of one artist you admire, noticing how they solve problems.
Visit a farmers market or botanical garden and gather sensory impressions.
Spend time intentionally tending something living—plants, a garden bed, or a window box.
Create
Wander through an antique store or thrift shop, imagining the stories behind the objects.
Take a field trip to a place you loved as a child and notice what still resonates.
Go on a photo walk with a single constraint—only shadows, only doorways, one color.
Gather images, phrases, or textures for a future project without starting it yet.
Visit an art museum and return again and again to a single room or era.
Plan an unstructured afternoon at home to play with your tools—no sharing, no saving, no judging.
And remember…
Planning artist dates isn’t about productivity or self-improvement. It’s about relationship—choosing, again and again, to show up for the part of you that notices, wonders, and responds to beauty.