What to do if there is no inspiration to paint?
April 14, 2023 at 11:14 am,
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Often after a long drawing or painting session, when you have to create many or voluminous works, there is a moment of silence in creation, and no matter how much you want to, you simply cannot raise your hand to pick up a pencil or a brush. Often, in such quiet moments of creativity, nothing comes to mind - inspiration has packed its suitcases and gone on vacation and an unknown period.
And then the question arises - How to start drawing and painting again? How to persuade yourself to sit down in front of the white canvas? How to find ideas for new works?
I have been in this situation quite often myself, so I collected a couple of ideas on how to bring creativity back to you:
1. Box (or a bag) of ideas
Write all kinds of words on the sheet (nouns, verbs, qualities, colors, etc.), cut the words separately into small pieces of paper and put them in a small box or gift bag. Then before you get ready to draw, pull out a couple of pages and see what comes together - try to draw that as well. Maybe there is something completely absurd (for example, a pink elephant on roller skates swatting flies with an iron), but at least it makes your imagination mill spin - how to draw it.
2. WannaDraw app
If, however, you prefer technology and you don't have time to cut pages, then this application was created with exactly this purpose, similar to the method of pages that I already mentioned - only as an application. In any case, this is also a good aid for awakening inspiration.
3. Coloring books.
Exactly! Let's go back to childhood. This is a good way to improve your work with colors, shadows, experiment with different techniques by pure painting, without thinking about the overall composition of the work, because you don't have to draw anything new (only if you really, really want to).
And if you don't want to buy coloring books - the internet is full of illustrations that you can print at home for free. Thus, for example, by painting the same illustration several times, only changing the place where the conditional light object is located (from which side the light falls), it is possible to better practice the perception of light and shadows when painting.
4. Create your works again.
It's nothing new and unusual when artists redraw what they've already drawn or painted, but you don't have to come up with anything new when creating this work either. As an example, you can take a sketch or a work you created a year ago, for example. By creating this work anew, you can compare how your skills have grown, mixed, maybe your glenning style or technique has changed during this time. Again, you don't have to bother with creating something new, or even inventing a new color palette - everything remains the same - only your performance has changed.
5. Various drawing challenges
You have already heard about the "Inktoberi" or "Mermay" challenges, where you have to draw something new every day. Well, this won't be exactly that, but on that side.
There are many challenges, such as the 3-color challenge, the 5-color challenge (where the work is painted with only a certain number of randomly selected colors), the opposite hand challenge (where you read the work from start to finish with the other hand that you do not write or draw with).
*Opposite hand challenge (since I'm left-handed, I'm drawing this with my right hand).
There are many different ways to activate your creativity in order to be able to create again and help you generate new ideas. :)