◆ MAKING THINGS · 2026-10-15

How Painting and Flow Unlock Your Next Big Idea

The best ideas I've ever had didn't arrive while I was grinding through a brief or staring at a screen willing something to happen. They showed up later, almost sideways, when my hands were busy doing something else entirely. Usually something made of paint.

I've been making art with my hands for as long as I can remember, and formally since my fine-art training at York University. Thirty years of working as an artist, animator, and motion designer haven't changed that habit. If anything, the years have made me trust it more. The hand-making isn't separate from the creative work. In a real way, it is the creative work.

Your Analytical Brain Is the Problem

When you sit down to solve a problem directly, your analytical mind takes over. It narrows the field. It wants to evaluate options before you've even finished generating them. It's efficient in a certain way, but efficiency is the enemy of the unexpected connection, and the unexpected connection is almost always where the good idea lives.

Flow is different. Flow is what happens when you're absorbed enough in a task that the critical voice quiets down and your attention stops policing itself. Athletes talk about it. Musicians know it. For me, the most reliable door into that state is making something with my hands.

When I'm painting, or working through a hand-drawn piece, there's a point where I stop thinking about the painting and start just doing it. The decisions become physical and intuitive rather than verbal and deliberate. And in that quiet, things connect. Something I was stuck on earlier in the week will suddenly have an answer. A direction I couldn't see from the front becomes obvious from the side.

I don't think this is mystical. I think it's just what happens when you give your brain a low-stakes, absorbing task and let it run in the background.

Why Making Things With Your Hands Works

There's something specific about hands-on making that a walk or a shower doesn't quite replicate, though those work too. When you're painting or drawing, you're engaged enough that you can't be mentally rehearsing a conversation or scrolling a mental to-do list. You're present in a way that's hard to force through sheer will. The medium demands just enough attention to crowd out the noise.

For me, hand-drawn art and animation have been central to how I think and work throughout my whole career. The hand and the eye develop a kind of conversation over years of practice. That conversation becomes its own thinking process. It operates differently from the part of my brain that writes decks or builds strategies, and that difference is exactly what makes it useful. You're not thinking harder about the problem. You're thinking differently, from a completely separate angle, and the problem gets solved almost as a side effect.

If you want to dig into how that hand-drawn sensibility carries through even into polished professional work, I wrote about it over here: Hand-Drawn Animation in a Template World.

You Don't Have to Be an Artist to Do This

Here's the thing. You don't need a fine-art background to use making as a thinking tool. You just need something absorbing and low-stakes enough that your inner critic backs off. For a lot of people, that's sketching, or working with clay, or even just doodling in the margin of a notebook. The medium matters less than the quality of attention it produces.

What you're looking for is that absorbed, playful state where you're not evaluating your output, you're just making. The moment you stop worrying about whether it's good is usually the moment something useful happens somewhere else in your mind.

Stepping away from the work isn't a break from the work. Sometimes it's where the actual work gets done.

I built an entire daily practice around this idea, which eventually became a structured creative habit I documented in the 100 Days of Art project. If you want something concrete to hang the habit on, the 100 Days of Art Workbook is a good starting point.

Make the Time, Even When It Feels Indulgent

The hardest part is giving yourself permission. When you're busy, making art for an hour feels like avoiding real work. But I'd push back on that framing pretty hard. Some of the clearest strategic thinking I've done in my career happened in the middle of making something, not in front of a whiteboard.

You're not slacking off. You're changing the channel on your brain in a way that direct effort simply can't. The analytical grind has its place, but it has limits. Flow doesn't. And you can't schedule a breakthrough, but you can reliably put yourself in the conditions where breakthroughs happen.

More of my thinking on creative practice, motion design, and the intersection of art and career lives at davidzak.com. Come take a look, and then go make something with your hands.

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