Vanilla Beans: Baking Cookies
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We’re at peak summer now*, so we’ve been discussing vacations and coloring breaks here in Vanilla Beans recently.
Sometimes you plan to be away. Sometimes life comes bursting through your normal routine like the Kool-ade Man.
No matter why you’ve set the markers aside, the unescapable fact is— if you’re not coloring, you’re losing skills.
But hey,
What if we don’t stop coloring completely? What if we squeeze in a little coloring time whenever we can? A few minutes here, a few minutes there…
Let’s talk about that today.
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*My apologies to our Aussie readers. Merry Christmas to you!
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BAKING COOKIES
I’ve heard a lot of coloring instructors and even more YouTubers talk about 20 minutes.
Twenty minutes a day, that’s all it takes. Just color something. It doesn’t take much…
Color me skeptical.
Very skeptical.
It feels like a used car sales pitch. You can improve your coloring in just a few minutes a day! $99 down, $99 a month!
I understand the appeal. Your time is limited. Some of you only have bits and bursts available, especially in the summer.
Hey Amy, isn’t a quick coloring session better than not touching my markers for months?
Well, I suppose something is better than nothing.
But it all hinges on what your something is.
See, a lot of people hear “20 minutes” and apply it to the kind of coloring you like to do. So you start a new project and you do a little bit every day.
But in my experience, that’ll be the worst looking project you’ve ever colored.
I’m glad you’re coloring but don’t expect much from the piecemeal approach.
Imagine baking a dozen chocolate chip cookies using the 20 minute tactic.
Some of you might gather and measure the ingredients today. Then you’ll mix the cookie dough tomorrow and bake the cookies the next day.
Others might make the dough in one session and freeze a bunch of little dough balls in the next session. Then you can bake cookies on demand over the next few weeks.
But that’s not how art works.
In art, you’d make enough dough for one cookie and bake it today. Then tomorrow, you’d make another tiny batch of dough and bake one more cookie. Every day, a new cookie starting from scratch.
Which is totally insane… but that’s what you do right?
Oh, I don’t have much time so I’ll color the puppy’s nose.
Real fast, I’ll color just the eyes.
Before I leave for the weekend, I’ll do the left ear.
Psssttt… you’re not coloring a puppy, you’re coloring random body parts.
And if you’re truly honest with yourself, you know it looks like a disjointed pile of pieces.
One reason why you don’t like your coloring is because you divide it to death.
Imagine all those individually made cookies sitting side by side:
A few will be fluffy if you overmixed the dough that day.
A couple spread flat because the dough wasn’t chilled to the right temperature.
Some are overbaked, some are underdone.
You forgot the salt in one. You shorted the sugar in another.
And you ran out of chocolate chips on day 10 so we have two sugar cookies on the plate.
My point is, you have a pile of cookies which look like they were baked by 12 different people.
Because you are a different person, every day.
And if you think baking consistently is hard, just try coloring consistently.
I’m a professional with 30+ years of experience and if it ain’t happening for me, consistency is surely not on your agenda anytime soon.
Nope, you’re wrong, Amy. I color all the Copic on one day, then I come back another day to add all the colored pencil!
Well, that’s almost worse.
Because you’re making great observations about color, shape, and form on day one.
Then all that knowledge gets flushed down the john when you spend the night worrying why Sharon from accounting rolled her eyes during your presentation.
Every break you take, every gap you make…
You’re interrupting both the mental and muscular flow required to color at your best.
It’s funny, I used to do 3 day retreats and students said they’d never colored better. They thought it was me and my teaching.
But really, for the first time in their life, they spent 3 days coloring uninterrupted.
And around this point, some of you are throwing your hands in the air.
I give up. I don’t have hours to color and now she’s telling me I can’t do short sessions.
Sorry. I’m not trying to be a downer.
I’m just pointing out the stuff other instructors won’t tell you because we make money selling the twenty minute system.
And here’s why I’m spilling the cookies—
You thought it was you. You thought you were a slow learner. You thought you lacked the talent to color the way you want to color.
It’s. Not. You.
There’s a reason art school is all day, every day, for several years.
20 minutes a day is something but it’s not the same.
Before you give up, before you drown your sorrows in a plate of mismatched cookies… there is a solution here.
The problem isn’t that you never color longer than twenty minutes at a time. Time and your inability to find more— that’s not the issue.
We can do great things with short coloring sessions.
Next week, I’ll show you a better 20 minute approach.
IF YOU LIKED TODAY’S ARTICLE, SUPPORT FUTURE FREE LESSONS
WARNING: VANILLA-WORKSHOPS
I no longer sell classes at Vanilla-Workshops.com. Teachable tripled their price, so I’ve spent the summer creating a new school at ColorWonk.com.
If you’ve purchased classes at Vanilla-Workshops.com at any time in the last 15 years:
Teachable has stopped providing forever access. I’m paying a hefty extortion fee to keep your classes alive for another year but I can’t afford to pay it forever. The cost of keeping 200+ classes (95% of which haven’t been touched by anyone for years) available forever will put me out of business.
VANILLA-WORKSHOPS.COM ACCESS EXPIRES IN DECEMBER 2026.
That’s plenty of time to download the materials, watch the videos, and learn the lessons.
Improve your skills to the point where you don’t need the classes anymore.
LET’S COLOR REALISTIC COOKIES!
Oh, Amy! I could never color crunchy, crumbly cookies! Look at all the detail! It’s too complicated!
Hang on a minute…
Are you settling for cartoonish coloring because the idea of coloring a million crumbs is terrifying?
Pssttt, it doesn’t have to be.
Artists have been drawing and painting very detailed things for centuries, with zero stress.
I’ll share how we do it.
Chocolate Chip Cookies is the newest class at Color Wonk
Learn to color complex textures in this introduction to food illustration.
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