Getting Over Artist’s Block
September 20th, 2022
My motivation to draw has grown and decreased over these past months. There have been periods of time where I wanted to do nothing but draw. I would go on three, four, five day sprees of getting home from school, doing any assignments as fast as possible, and then spending the next three hours just drawing in my sketchbook.
Motivation is two sides of the same coin, though. Sometimes, I hit walls, which is commonly known as an artist’s block (Credit: Kevin Hayler). I don’t want to draw. I set up my tools, bring up a reference, and I just… can’t.
There is no evolving past this kind of loss of motivation. Even if I do belittle my own knowledge of art at times, this is something that I know for certain. But, there is one thing anyone that runs into roadblocks can do to lessen the size of the loss. That is, produce bad content.
That isn’t to say that you should go into something planning on doing poorly, or creating something you won’t like. But, I have had to accept the reality that I won’t always create my best art so far. Every time I draw something new, it isn’t necessarily better than the last thing I drew, or even the first thing I drew.
And that’s okay. My art got better because I kept at it. It did not get better because I focused on making a drawing that was always better than the last. If I held myself to that standard, then I would inevitably quit drawing because I wouldn’t allow myself to focus on refining basic skills that I am bad at.
Some would offer advice, saying to look for different kinds of references using things such as Pinterest or the Instagram explore page. And, I will be going over how that does help for building inspiration. However, to tackle waning motivation at its core, it is much more important to be able to work directly through a lack of motivation rather than trying to supplement it with new inspiration.
(365 words)
Comments
Post a Comment