Letโs imagine one day you head to your workstation, your room is flooded with tons of art supplies, yet your mind suffers a drought of ideas! I know you feel me to the core, and donโt you worry; youโre not alone! We all have days where finding art inspiration is more complicated than drinking soup with a fork.
Getting over that creative blockage and finding art inspiration may be troublesome; thus, here in this article, I bring you 13 ways to find art inspiration from day-to-day life. These will give you a little push and set you off in the right direction!
Journal Your Routine!
Okay, you need to hear me out for this one. Understandably, journaling is not everyoneโs cup of tea, but as an artist, give it a shot from an artistโs point of view. Journaling can act as a beautiful catalyst for creating artwork. If you donโt like writing, bullet journal your day to summarize it.
Use prompts such as:
- Five things you were grateful for today
- Five things/occasions that made you happy
- Five food items you had today
- Random things about today
- Little steps I took today for success
- Acts of kindness you did today
Now, when you feel youโre running low on art inspiration, come back to your journal and take motivation from it. Try summing up your day in an artwork. You could use collages, mixed media art, or any other given medium on the go. To spice it up, you could weave a comic around your dayโs summary, allowing you to vent your literary talent, too! If you feel this comic thing is your forte, go ahead and weave a comic for a whole week!
Read and Watch!
Review novels, short stories, plays, blogs, etc., to look for art inspirations. Try to picture the protagonists and other characters in your head. Try visualizing the various settings where the described scenes must have occurred!
You could also surf through OTT platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime for amazing shows and movies. Observe the costumes, jewelry, and makeup of the performing artists.
How could you use these as art inspirations? Since you are the creator here, you can add twists and turns to the characters and the plot of the stories whichever way you want to, and then depict another side of a certain story! This can be really amusing because, in a way, you are free to re-direct your desired movie or story!
Meet New People
Try enrolling yourself in extra activities such as calligraphy, dance, or any other skill class that gets the adrenaline rushing through you! This way, youโll release more feel-good hormones, and your enhanced mood will allow you t be inspired and motivated more often.
Strike up conversations with new people when you walk into the class or after the class is over and get to know them, their likes and dislikes. Show genuine interest in them, what they do, and why they do it. If you feel comfortable, let them know youโre an artist looking for art inspiration and wanna get to know them. Record, write, or memorize what they have to say and use their characters as art inspirations.
Network with Other Artists
As an artist, you may work in isolation, alone in the studio, for long hours. This solitude can give rise to a short-lived lack of inspiration, which can be impossible to circumvent. Get out, meet other artists, visit local gallery openings, breathe, and talk art. Every conversation, in one way or another, will stimulate your creativity.
If you are an introvert, consider meeting artists online, visiting art blogs, sign up for various newsletters. Follow artists or art pages on Instagram or Pinterest. They can be constant sources of inspiration because these artists keep posting their artworks online very frequently!
Socializing with other artists and coming together to create will undoubtedly leave you brimming with positive energy. Take the help of fellow artists for art inspirations to get away with a dull period; their pieces of advice are going to be priceless! They can pull you out of this dull phase as they can connect to it as theyโve been in your shoes before.
Participate in Art Challenges!
Several online websites conduct monthly or weekly art challenges where they give you a prompt for each consecutive day. The aim is to โcreateโ each day.
If you search the internet about it, you can find lots of artists posting such prompts and even pictures attached to them for references! They also invite other artists to create artwork within a certain deadline.
One very trendy prompt list that took over the internet was โInktoberโ in October 2020, where you just had to make a drawing in ink and use the hashtag #inktober with it.
Owing to these prompts, youโll never run low on art inspirations! On completion of the artwork, you need to click and upload pictures of your work. It may be published on the website. This is also an opportunity for you to build your portfolio, write reciprocal comments, and interact with the public.
Shuffle Through Your Art Supplies Regularly
I highly recommend you to shuffle through your art supplies once every now and then because this way, you can get rid of the detested and expired products. Also, there are high chances that you come across certain art supplies that you thought youโve lost!ย This works for me all the time, and I get excited to create something with the art supply I just found.
Please take good care of your workspace too. Declutter unwanted items because itโs your workstation and not a storage closet, fill it with things that you actually need!
When youโre in a phase where youโre feeling uninspired, and otherwise too, keep your art supplies accessible and organized. Doing so cuts down the time you need to spend doing non-creative things before you can delve into your creative space.
Take the Wrong Turn!
Yes, you heard me, right! The next time you commute from home to work, take the wrong turn, and get lost for a while. On this off-roading trip, donโt think about your day-to-day life problems; instead, try focusing on things you seldom notice. Your art inspirations have always been around, but you fail to take note of them.
Look at that small rustic cottage, tattered clothes drying on a clothesline on a fine sunny day or something as insignificant as a weed pushing its way out on the corner of the road. All these can serve as amazing art inspirations for your next masterpiece!
Also, try to declutter your head of unwanted thoughts and negativity that may be adding to the imaginative blockage in you!
Travel and Capture!
Whenever you travel, you create moments that you want to relish for longer. Without missing another opportunity, start capturing these moments more often.
Itโs better to use first-hand photographs than someone elseโs for citation. Youโll always have a greater affinity towards these photos because youโve clicked them, and you will surely have memories attached to each photograph; all of it adds to the value of the image!
Surfing through magazines and the internet is a great option, but very often, these provide copyrighted material, so nothing is better than taking your own photographs.
Keep your Photographs Organized!
This point goes hand in hand with the previous one. When you click photographs, you should also develop a habit of keeping them organized. I like to keep my hard copies in a binder; these also include pictures that I clip out and save because they inspire me somehow.
My digital files are uploaded in a folder in my Google drive because that way, I can access it through my phone and laptop both and also be sure of never losing it. If youโre using a free online database, make sure they are licensed to allow derivative work. You can bookmark these links in a specific folder, or in the case of Pinterest, you can always Pin them!
Now when you lack art inspirations, shuffle through your old photos and try to remember why you saved it in the first place.
Was it the texture that ignited the spark within you, or was it the structure/ composition?
Looking at these photos and their artistic values will again ignite the artistic flame, and itโll get your constructive energy flowing again!
Be One with Nature
I could say spending time with nature is a foolproof method as itโs since forever we have been listening to the healing benefits of nature. Whenever you feel lost, you can be sure of finding yourself again amid nature!
Researches show that when one spends even 20 minutes in a place where they feel connected to nature, they experience a drop in the level of stress hormones called cortisol and witness instant upliftment of mood.
You donโt necessarily have to go to the wilderness to cherish nature, even caring for the potted plants on your windowsill may be enough for you!
Nature could be your refuge when boredom strikes. Finding art inspirations in nature itself can be incredible. Look at the way a branch has twitched or how a sparrow flaunts shades and tints of brown, the texture of the Neem bark could inspire you too!
Workout and Listen to Music!
A workout is an amazing vent to all the negative energies. It instantly makes you feel rejuvenated and is accompanied by a sense of achievement and fulfillment with it. Work out in an open space to breathe in the fresh air; if you can, it is going to leave you mesmerized! Make workout a part of your daily schedule, and youโll be in a much better mood than before. These creative jams are inevitable, but when you work out regularly, youโll face them less often than before.
Listen to music if it alleviates your soul, hum to the beats. Dance your heart out if that works for you! Just keep exploring about what makes you feel alive and gets your creative juices spurting (other than creating, of course!) and give yourself into it!
Avoid the Internet and Keep Experimenting!
Haha, sounds contradictory as you read this on the internet, right? But it is true!
For finding art inspirations, one shouldnโt go around looking on the net unless theyโre stuck in a deadlock! Choose to experiment instead! Never be afraid to experiment since youโre an artist; you wonโt know until you donโt try your hand on it! It is while experimenting that one is most likely to create something like never before and find inspiration within themselves!
Create to โCreateโ
When you are going through a dull phase, create art because you relish creating and not for the sake of presenting it before an audience. This sounds crazy and pointless, but this process can be very liberating.
Focus on a technique you love or one youโve been longing to try. Experiment! Restrict your palette with shades and hues of color only, or use all the colors all together to create a vibrant masterpiece. Just go with the flow and create art without worrying about the outcome!
You need to know that it is okay if the final product isnโt looking precisely like what it looked like in your head. How our imagination envisions the final piece is often very different from the results.
Embrace your artwork and efforts, even if it takes a different turn during execution. It takes a lot of practice to render exactly what is pictured in your mind!
On the days you feel dull, validate that feeling. It is okay not to be okay; allow yourself some time too! And a most important reminder: in art, greater fun is in the journey, not in the destination. Savor every step of your creative journey to the peak!
Drawing art inspirations is a very subjective thing; you have to find out what suits you the best! Undertake the points as mentioned above and let us know if any of these worked for you! Comment down below and let us know what you do to draw art inspirations!
Good luck, happy creating:)
Last Updated on by Sathi