How I deal with art block (Patreon)

I wanted to do a bit of a different post- a blog entry I guess! I’d like to talk about my current method for handling art block, since its helped me a lot since I started doing it and I figured it could be helpful or interesting to share! 

For me, when I experience art block, it’s usually because I’ve lost direction. I personally find seeing so much art on social media every day (instagram, Twitter, etc) can make it easy to ‘muddle’ my own direction- it can get difficult to differentiate between art that I love to look at, and art that I want my own art to look similar to. 

So, what I’ve started doing when I feel art blocked is sitting down and creating an inspiration board of artists whose work I love and want to bring aspects of into my own work. If I had a printer I would probably print out images to stick on a cork board or something- but I don’t so I just make a collage in Procreate hahaha.

For reference, here’s a couple that I made in May-

I find just the act of sitting down, scrolling though your favourite artists, and actively making the distinction between ‘I love this person’s art, but this isn‘t what I want my art to look like’ and ‘I love this person’s art and I want my art to move in this direction in some way’ incredibly helpful. I think it kind of clears and resets my brain inspiration-wise, and usually making the board gets me pretty amped up to draw. 

Here’s one that I made yesterday cause I’ve been feeling ‘bleh’ about drawing (still able to work on Sparks pages, but not much interest in drawing outside of that) and I figured it was time to do another one!

This one is smaller because a lot of the artists on the previous boards are still main inspirations for me hahaha, although some have also kind of fallen off as my ideas of where I want my art to go keep changing. 

Once you have a board, it’s easier to look at it and figure out what there is in common, and what you should be working on. Ex looking at these I definitely need to work on doing backgrounds in my coloured stuff more, and I’m definitely on a kick at the moment of like, floral shoujo-esque aesthetics and lots of plants/vegetation. 

Well yeah! I hope that was interesting, if you’re ever art blocked I definitely encourage giving it a go, even if it doesn’t jump start getting you out of the block at least it’ll take your mind off of it for a bit, and it’s fun to compile the board together hahaha. The next time I do one I’ll share it as well, hopefully it’s interesting to see what’s inspiring me at the time, and also it’s fun to share the artists I’m loving! Check them out! (All the @s are twitter handles, for the middle board where I just put names they are, in order: @newjackcole @loiclocatelli @yoriyukiii @natandrewson @seanilew)