Part 5
I struggled a lot this week, I felt beyond frustrated with the whole creative process. Instead of having a nice flow, where it feels like a good new juicy pen, flowing with gorgeous saturated ink. Image after image flooding my pages with delicious floral delights, meditative and calming. No, instead this week I had one of those stages where my metaphorical pen felt dry, scratchy and blocked! I call it creative constipation.
After all these years, I’ve finally learned to recognise this block and I don’t get suckered in quite as badly as I used to.
These blocks tend to happen for a couple of reasons and for me its usually one of the following.
My tastes and skill levels have changed, after weeks of drawing or studying a subject matter, my ability improves and if I continue to do without giving my brain a chance to catch up on everything it’s learned it starts to get slow and becomes a frustrating process. The cure here is to stop for a bit, take some time off or draw something different.
I’ve been doing too much and not taking enough time to look after myself, using all my free time to create and learn, I guess it ties in with number one. And again, the cure is to take some time off, step away and let my mind recover.
I get bogged down with comparison envy, looking at all the amazing and inspiring work of other people and feeling like my work is not good enough so wanting to give up completely, This one is a particularly insidious one, and one that consumed me most of the time throughout my 20’s, it happens so rarely now as I’ve learned to recognise it and take steps to prevent it. I’ll write a post about this in future, outlining what I do to break out of this habit if it’s something you also struggle with from time to time.
So, now, it’s a mixture of 1 and 2 and instead of listening to my brain and hand, I persisted and made things I’m not in love with, but that’s ok. The challenge was to draw every day regardless of the outcome so I’m glad I did continue to create.
Part 6
However, life wanted to force me to have a break. I didn’t plan this challenge around half terms and holidays, I have been unable to work as much so I took the break. I still tried every day to do something, but it just wasn’t happy days, I spent a maximum of 20 mins on them and stopped just shy of wanting to stab a pen through my hand to stop me working, ha!
Whilst I’ve not shared all these on my social media pages (lest we risk ruining our beautifully curated and tailored feed, haha… seriously though) I’m sharing them here to stay true to documenting the whole challenge lows as well as highs. After my week off, I’m starting to come out of my funk and seeing that, a lot of these pieces, if finished could have made something relatively nice. Goes to show how mind set and perspective really plays into productivity.
I’ve since been working on some nice and simple black line work pieces and I’m starting to enjoy things again. I may finish off a few of these pieces in future or see if I can use them in another way. Something to think about.
So, that’s it for now, I’m gonna get crack-a-lacking!
See you next week!
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