The Gentle Rebel Podcast Grow Creative Confidence Using Sketching (with Sam Marshall)
Would you like to develop more creative confidence? Have you ever embarked on, or considered, a sketching practice?
In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we explore the link between the two in conversation with artist, printmaker, and creative coach Sam Marshall.
Sam is based here in the UK and has recently released a beautiful book called Sketch: A Project Guide To Drawing With Confidence. I was fortunate enough to receive a digital copy last year and honestly, wow. It inspires, equips, and gently mentors people to start a drawing practice and engage with their natural creativity.
What I love most about the book is its emphasis on helping you find your own creative voice. This is supported by Sam’s Sketch Squad, a small group of participants who work through the exercises together. Seeing the same prompts interpreted in wildly different ways has a surprisingly powerful effect. For me, the most helpful part was witnessing the sheer range of styles, approaches, and ways of noticing the world.
Creative Confidence and the Beauty of Difference
A huge part of creative confidence is realising that differences in how we see, what we notice, and what we care about are not flaws.
This is why art and creativity sit at the heart of being human. Creative expression is our collective humanity experiencing itself in all its weird and wonderful variety. I was reminded of this recently while talking about map-making as a way to understand our relationship with different areas of life. If you give the same prompt to 100 people, you do not get a single map done well. You get a hundred completely different maps.
That is what I hope people take into and out of this conversation. Difference is beautiful. It is not about doing it right. What Sam offers through this book is a sketching practice that gives us tracks along which to see, feel, and experience the world in a more alive and interesting way than when we are stuck in ultra-productivity mode, trying to make everything efficient and easy.
Why a Sketching Practice Builds Creative Confidence
A drawing practice helps us slow down, observe, and engage our creative spirit through process rather than outcome.
There is something gently rebellious about sketching in the digital age, where the default response is to pull out a phone and take a photo. There is a difference between capturing something quickly so we can hoard and move on, and drawing as a way of anchoring ourselves in the environment.
Drawing asks us to stay. To notice. To let time pass while the world happens around us. Light shifts. Shadows move. People come and go. Smells, sounds, and sensations change. Rather than consuming the environment, we are engaging with it.
Sam shares a lovely story about drawing in public and finding herself surrounded by Japanese school children. It creates a beautiful image of the quiet, magnetic energy that people who are deeply engaged with life often carry. Perhaps we are drawn to them because they are interesting. Or perhaps because they are moving at a pace many of us are craving.
Practice Over Skill
Focusing on practice rather than skill also reshapes what success means in art.
Instead of achievement, accomplishment, or the finished piece, success becomes about rhythm, consistency, and an ongoing relationship with seeing and making. Letting go of outcome-oriented art is not about lowering standards. It is about shifting attention.
It is not about producing pretty drawings. Rather, it is about sitting down with your sketchbook and using it as a tool for observing. Drawing anchors us in space and time, allowing us to witness change as it unfolds.
The Sketching Exercises Sam Walks Us Through
In the conversation, Sam takes us through the thinking behind the book’s exercises, each designed to build creative confidence through experience.
In the Home
Starting where you are. Noticing objects and spaces you have spent years with, perhaps without really seeing them.
Outside the Home
Venturing out to see the walls of your world from the outside. Noticing what is close by and reconnecting with physical space. It reveals details in neighbourhoods and communities that often go unseen.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Drawing
Sam explores some of the beliefs that hold people back, such as:
“What if I am not good enough?”
“I do not want to look silly or draw like a five-year-old.”
Portraits
Portraits were the most challenging exercise for many Sketch Squad members. They require vulnerability. You ask something of another person, and you share something personal in return. This is something we see in Tuula’s Photoyoga For Your Mind Experience.
25 Days of Drawing
Simple prompts designed to build a habit and keep you drawing without overthinking it.
Drawing in Public
Another edge for many people. Being seen doing something personal and slightly unusual in a culture that loves to judge creative effort.
Drawing on Holiday
Experiencing places through the slowness of drawing adds depth to memory. Sam shares a sketchbook from her recent trip to Japan, which holds far more meaning for her than a photo album ever could. A helpful reminder for any habit, too. Start on the first day away. Intentions turn into behaviours quickly, for better or worse.
Drawing From Paintings
A way of engaging critically with art as part of the human story, not just as a product. It teaches us about history, context, and what we might want to bring into our own practice.
Experimental Drawing
Combining senses. Drawing from music, film, collage, and even dreams.
The Personal Project
Turning the practice into a chosen project that marks a pause between chapters. Sam explains why she calls this a personal project rather than a final assignment.
How Creative Confidence Actually Grows
Creative confidence does not arrive before we start. It emerges along the way. Through consistency, we become confident in what we notice and why we care. For experimental types, confidence is not something we can fake into existence. But we can trust that playful, curious engagement with something like a sketching practice develops capacities we do not yet have language for.
I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thank you again to Sam for giving her time so generously and for walking us through the thinking behind, beneath, and within the book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Connect with Sam through her website and on her Instagram.
