Art Block or Mental Block

Hey! It’s okay! I’m not an artist but I am a musician and I imagine that many of the same things can be transferred over. Some things — like art and music — are skills that we learn over time and we put alot of effort into learning that skill. But the good news is that we never truly forget that skill, and while it’ll take some time to get back to where you were, it won’t take nearly as long as it did to learn it the first time. The skills kinda get a little “rusty” but they don’t ever really disappear.

Honestly I think this sort of thing happens to everyone at some point in their lives. I’m a musician, right? I play every day. Maybe it’s trumpet, maybe it’s piano, maybe it’s tuba, maybe it’s just running through rudimental exercises with a pair of sticks and a drum pad. But I play everyday. A couple of years ago, I had surgery to remove my tonsils because they got infected. I couldn’t play for a week and when I finally did pick up my trumpet, my skills weren’t as sharp as they had been. My tone was terrible, I felt like I wasn’t in control of my tongue and what I was trying to play. I even felt like I had lost air capacity in just a week because it felt like I didn’t have the same air support I had before.

Point is: it’s easy to get discouraged when you feel like it’s an uphill battle and you’re not as good as you once were. Sometimes we have to ignore our own inner critic that we’re not good enough and just make something. Just play, just draw. We have to cut ourselves a bit of slack that we feel like we aren’t good enough anymore and just start working those skills again. They’ll come back with time, but only if you’re using them.

 

I'm not as passionate about my art as I used to be. There was a time when I would draw all day every day, but now I can go weeks without any drawing. And the whole time I'm not drawing, I'm not practising or improving.

There are several different things that put me off my drawing.

One is the fact that I don't like drawing from my imagination any more. When I was younger I would fill a whole sketchbook with doodles and ideas and just pull characters and creatures out of thin air. I can't do that any more. If I draw something purely from imagination, I hate the look of it. Now days I need to have reference materials in front of me. I take a lot of photos to use as reference, but I rarely get round to using them. It feels like hard work to get myself in the creative mood again, and often I just can't be bothered.

Video games tend to distract me as well. Or Netflix and Amazon. There's always something I want to catch up on, so I abandon my drawing. When I was younger I'd put on a TV show on in the background while I was drawing. It doesn't work like that any more. I would watch my old shows on repeat and just look up from my sketchbook when an interesting scene came up. But now there are so many shows I've never seen before, and I get hooked on them and want to know what happens next, so I put 100% focus on watching the show and 0% on my drawing.

Internet activity reduces my drawing as well. When I was younger I didn't have access to chat forums or social media. Now I'm constantly checking for messages and getting into chats, exactly like i'm doing now, so I end up not drawing. And when I've been staring at a screen for hours the last thing I want to do is spend yet more time staring at a screen while working on a digital art project.

Then there are the million other artists out there on the internet who are constantly uploading their own artwork. This puts me off as well, because their work is so god I feel like a total amature. They upload an image that took them 2 hours and if I were to create something that level, I would probably spend months on it. Plus they get thousands of likes for every image they upload. I upload one of my images and I'm lucky if I get about 16 likes.

So, there are all kinds of things that discourage me from being creative. I am working on it, I have bursts of creativity from time to time, then I need to stop and take a rest. A long rest. But mainly it's about all these bad habits that I should cut down on. I should not necessarily quit all those other activities that I enjoy, but reduce the time I spend doing them.

 

What I have found in my own experience fighting artist block is that anxiety and depression inhibit executive function. As someone who studied new media art, the long hours in front of the computer took it's toll. I have since gone back to traditional methods, doing most tasks manually that I would use the computer for. Without the constant distraction of surveillance capitalism breathing down my neck as I work, things have gotten much better. By turning the computer off and sitting down with pencil and paper, the steps I need to complete a project are clearer and easier to refine.

Another thing that helped me was going back to basics and refining the work process step by step, changing how I approach making to begin with. All of the skills that I want to use are part of regular studio hours and working in batches helps to ensure the skills that I need stay as sharp as they can.

Writing exercises can also be helpful. I have a bunch of writing prompt books, lists for writers, and references to help generate ideas. The writing is more helpful for my fantasy body of artwork, and less so for representation landscape work. If working with landscape, then doing field work and gathering reference material helps a great deal.

 

I've found trying to force myself to be creative is about as useful as just banging my head against a brick wall.

I probably have too many projects, but kind of bouncing between them keeps the creative ideas flowing a little better for me at least. I will work on a story for a bit, then maybe muddle around in CAD, might sit in the garage and tinker with garage projects, then jump back to something else when an idea does come up.