THINGS TO TRY WHEN ARTBLOCK HITS

If you're an artist, you've surely experienced this annoying thing called ~Art Block~

at least once in your life. Here I want to talk about things I do when this happens.

More than once I've found myself unable to draw or even look at my tablet, for days and days on. No matter how much I wanted to draw or how many ideas I had, my brain seemed incapable to get to it.

The things I'm gonna talk about are personal experience, about me and my art. You might find other approaches more useful and, of course, you're all welcome to give your (respectful) opinion.

I must say I had never experienced an Art Block, or at least, a major one, until we entered quarantine in march. Before, I was always so busy with university projects or work, that I was always willing to have some free time for myself and my characters. When quarantine came, with lots of free time and no escape from home, things changed.

I started feeling like drawing was a requirement, more than something I loved doing. I needed to be drawing everyday or I wouldn't feel productive and mark the day as a failure. This, obviously, didn't bring any good to me or my already fragile mental state. I got very frustrated with everything I tried to produce, no matter what I drew or how hard I tried, anything was up to standard. Obviously, social media wasn't helping at all and I even left Instagram for a couple of weeks, back in May.

My first approach to try and get rid of the art block was just to force myself into drawing. I thought that if I tried again and again and again I would get what I wanted eventually. I soon discovered this was a terrible approach for me and that it was doing more harm than anything else. This just made me more frustrated with my inability to draw what I wanted.

2020 has been a long year of discovery, not only related to my artistic side. I found lots of things that made me improve my art and my relationship with it. It hasn't been an easy path, I had lots of breakdowns related to my art and my future as an artist. But I can surely say now, that I know how to deal with these blocks and breakdowns much much better than a year ago. This is what I do now when I get an Art Block:

• The first thing it's let it be. Yes, it might seem impossible: normally, even if you're blocked, you really wanna draw something. You have to accept that Art Blocks will happen, and have to learn how to go through them with minimum damage. As I said, forcing myself to draw wasn't helping at all with it, so I would rather find another activity to distract myself.

• Having other hobbies as an artist is really important. I'll try to turn to artistic hobbies first, such as writing or crafting. If I'm not able to perform this either, because my art block goes beyond drawing and affects all my artistic capabilities, I'll try other things. Watching series or movies, enjoying some music, cooking, reading or even meditating have been helpful on this occasion.

• In my opinion, inspiration is very tied to personal experiences and relationships. When we start drawing (or pouring our ideas into any other artistic form), we have a big library of experiences and feelings to express, even if we're unaware of it. But we can run out of them too. Going out, talking to friends, walks and experiencing new or old things are very good sources of inspiration to an artist. This quarantine was especially hard for me, because I found myself with nothing new to tell or do. Everyday was the same and my art was affected by this too.

• Thankfully, we live in a digital era, and we can experience brand new emotions and get lots of ideas from a tiny screen in our hands. Series, movies, pictures and more, can be great sources of inspiration too and don't require much movement. The ideal is having a mixture of both, but if times require it (as quarantine), we can turn to this.

• The experiences don't have to be things that happen to you in first person. As an artist it is very important that we observe the world surrounding us. Not only colours, lights and textures. I find it very interesting to analyze how other humans interact or behave in different situations. This can help you build scenes, personalities and dialogs for future drawings or writings.

A drawing it's not only the visual part, but how alive you make it feel and most of the time, tiny details are what help you bring this sensation into your work. The personality of a character can be shown in a background.

• We might find something new that inspires us when we break our daily routine. But be careful with not overwhelming yourself. To much sudden activity, out of the normal, can exhaust us mentally and if we are exposed to full routines with little time to rest mentally, we can find ourselves unable to draw once again. Everybody has to find their perfect balance and what works for them. Not only introverts need to recharge batteries.

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Now, there's a lot of reasons to get an Art Block. One of the most common ones is our own high expectations regarding art. A lot of artist, me included, have a hard time when drawing because we want everything to turn out perfectly from minute one and when it doesn't (and most probably it never will) we get frustrated or even blocked or burned out. Getting off this train is difficult and requires a lot of inner work, to understand and internalize that not everything you do has to be perfect. Here are some exercises that help me to be okay with the mistakes I do:

• Buy a really cheap sketchbook and destroy it. Draw whatever you want, with as many materials you want, mix things, try new techniques, use coffee if you want, stickers, do collages, draw whatever shit you feel like drawing. It doesn't matter if the paper doesn't support it properly, the sketchbook was cheap anyway. Just let your feelings into the paper, write on it if you have to. You don't have to show it to anyone, you don't have to post it anywhere, it's just for you and your random thoughts.

• Use a pen for sketching. When drawing with a pen there's no going back, you can't erase your mistakes, and believe me when I say this is the best it can happen to you. If you mess up there's just two possible outcomes: You accept your mistake and move on, or you draw it again. There's no downside.

• Use sketches and thumbnails in your advantage. A sketch doesn't always need to become a final piece, but it can be really useful for us. Fast sketches and thumbnails not only loosen your drawing capabilities, but can help you decide the main idea behind a new illustration. With something as tiny as a finger, you can decide the composition and look of an illustration without investing much time on it. If you go directly for the final product, you might find lots of difficulties in choosing all the aspects of your illustration and make it harder to correct mistakes.

The sketches don't need to be beautiful or detailed, just enough for you to understand what you wanna convey.

• Don't believe everything you see online. One of your favourite artists has recently uploaded a very clean and neat sketch dump and now you feel miserable? Most probably those are a selection of their best sketches, that they've taken the time to clean or develop. I'm sure if you go through their sketchbook, you'll find lots of discarded ones they've never posted and in which you can see clear mistakes. They're humans too.

This is how my fast sketches and thumbnails look:

Some are bigger than others but in general they follow the same rule: explore.

Note that even this is a selection and I most probably left some really ugly ones out.

Let mistakes happen.

And this is how a page of selected sketches looks:

(Notice that I like to give my sketches an unfinished look, because they are, after all, only that: sketches)

• Don't draw only to have something to post. Turning a hobby into something you only do to please others it's not the right path to choose, even less for Instagram. Social media is very fast and creating with it as a priority will drain us when we don't achieve the visibility we want. There's a lot of things to have into account to make social media work in our favour and there's people whose jobs are fully dedicated to it. I could write another separate entry only in how bad can social media be for us artist, but not today ~

As everything, there must be a balance in how much you draw because of obligation (job, university, to get an audience, etc...) and how much you do for yourself, and the second one is very important. When you put your love into your work and are passionate about it, people will notice.

• Figure drawing and life drawing are your friends. I had some wonderful anatomy and biology classes at university and those included some figure drawing and other helpful techniques with life models.

They help you loosen up, draw faster, allow mistakes and explore poses overall, as well as being fun. Having real life models is a privilege, even more nowadays, with Covid around, but there's some really good sites that give you reference poses for practice, like Line of Action.

Figure drawing consists of doing fast sketches, coping the poses you have as reference. Normally, you start with 30'' per pose, and then advance into 1' or even 5'. You just have to draw the general feeling of the pose. But it's important you find a pace with which you're comfortable, improvement will come with time.

• Redraw something you like. It can be an old drawing, a screenshot from a movie, a famous painting, a DTIYS, whatever will do. Maybe you don't have the energy and motivitaion to create something new from scratch, so this may be the perfect solution for you. The main idea, composition, poses, colors and concept of the drawing are already thought. You only have to copy. I think redrawing your own art is a very good technique, not only to try and overcome art block, but to actually see how much you've improved through the years. Below you can see a drawing I've redone 5 times already, the first one dating back to 2013, when I was only 16.

Finally, to end today's blog entry, I want to leave a list of books that have helped me improve my skills and that I'm sure you can find on the internet:

• Human anatomy for artist, Goldfinger

• Dynamic figure drawing, Hogarth

• Perspective made easy, Norling

• Color and Light, Gurney

Having a bunch of Art Books from your favourite movies and series can also be a good source of inspiration and learning. I have a good amount of Disney artbooks, as well as concepts and designs from the Harry Potter movies.

That's all! Thanks for reading 'til this point, I hope my experience can help you too when the Art Block hits. Be gentle to youself and embrace mistakes.

Have a nice day!