How to Beat Artist’s Block From Dr. Janet Montgomery
Tips for regaining your inspiration when youre suffering from artist’s block. Its a devastating thing for an artist to feel theyve lost their inspiration, to encounter a creative block. But suffering from artists block doesnt mean youve lost your artistic ability and it can be overcome. Dr. Janet Montgomery has some tips to help beat artists block:
Beating Artists Block Tip 1: It’s the fear of not being able to do it that is making you feel you’ve lost your inspiration. To get rid of the fear, you must approach your painting as if it were a job and DO IT.
Beating Artists Block Tip 2: Force yourself to set a goal of X number of paintings. Copy if you must, use kitchen tools as models if you must, but simply getting into the paint itself will begin to inspire you, even if you don’t like the subject matter.
There’s always something to learn.
Beating Artists Block Tip 3: Change media. If acrylic, go to oil. If oil, go to printmaking.
Beating Artists Block Tip 4: Search for new painters on the web, using Google’s image search. Go to galleries. Try to find an artist who’s doing something that appeals to you, something that the voice inside you says, «I could do that» or «I’d like to be able to do that.» Secure an image and copy it to find out what that artist did and how. Then think about recombining ideas.
Beating Artists Block Tip 5: Play the «what if?» game. What if I painted this old subject matter on a tire? What if I put together a still life of bricks? How can I use a new material, a new subject matter, a new style. Be wild in your considerations.
Beating Artists Block Tip 6: Remember that everyone has fallow periods. I don’t consider them really fallow, just the subconscious taking a breather and getting ready to take a different direction.
Beating Artists Block Tip 7: Check out some books on creative thinking to give you a jolt.
Beating Artists Block Tip 8: Take a trip to somewhere you’ve never considered, even if it’s only to a local town you’ve never explored. Always take a sketchbook, everywhere you go. Or a digital camera. Imagine yourself a Lilliput or a giant to change your perspective.
Beating Artists Block Tip 9: Keep a journal of drawings and writings for a month. Pick something from the journal to paint. Review it in six months or a year.
Beating Artists Block Tip 10: Compile a scrapbook of family portraits -- not just faces, but each family member doing something typical -- a candid sketch with writing about the person, the time, your impressions. Keep it in a journal for your kids’ kids.
Beating Artists Block Tip 11: Go to a senior citizen center and draw the people there. Talk to them about their life stories. Try to express your response in mixed media using copies of their old photographs, etc.
Beating Artists Block Tip 12: Take a class that forces you to produce in a structured environment.
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In fact Dodgson was quite specific in his instructions to Tenniel, and the hair and style of dress of fictional Alice was quite different to the dark haired and conservative Alice Liddell. He’d even suggested the illustrations be based on another girl altogether, one Mary Hilton Badcock. Tenniel declined the use of a model, saying, «I no more need one than you should need a multiplication table to work out a mathematical problem!» Still, the illustrations do bear a passing resemblence to Miss Badcock.
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