3 tips to get into creative mindspace to do art

Surely, you have felt at some point terribly uninspired or not in the mental headspace. That is normal, we all creatives deal with it at some point or another.

To have an art routine is important, not only to upgrade your art skills but to run your career as an artist. However, sometimes life gets in the way, we can loose our routine, we can have trouble stablishing it. Life happens and these tips help you along the way to put your head in the mental space for work and build that routine that takes 2000 repetitions to engrave it in our minds.

Warm up doodles

I discovered this trick when I put myself to learn to draw back in 2019. It is far better to do 100 little doodles than to make 5 very well made drawings. I learned that the fact to doodle puts me in the mental space to do more complex activities in art.

So for this tip you want to have your sketchbook and do 5 minutes small drawings during 15 minutes. You have to make, at least, 3 small drawings in 15 minutes. It does not matter if they are good, bad or ugly. Take whatever inspires you, any beautiful image you find on your gallery, pinterest or stock images websites. Do them even if you don´t want to, even if you are in a bad mood.

By the time you finish them, you will want to continue doing art. Whether is to fill the sketchbook page or go do something else art related. This exercise also warms up your muscles for more extenious art activities such as: sculpting, preping your canvas, etc.

It is important for you at the moment you finish these exercises to understand, these are warm up, not meant to be part of your portfolio, not meant to be good. They are being done for you to find the energy to do art and put your mental space into the creative process.

Journaling

If your mind is busy with a thousand million ideas, chores and life experiences. The best you can do is write. Take your notebook, your diary or a spare paper laying around. Then pour every single thing that has been going on in your mind. Wether they are chores or the most heart-breaking events that stuck in your mind at that moment.

Once you pour everything into the paper, you can move the information such as chores into your personal agenda and make sure you will do them after you finish with your art session. You can also dispose the paper you wrote into if you feel is too much emotional bagagge. I personally have my diary for these things. This help me digest emotions and retrospect into past live experiences.

Turn off the phone

Social media takes the most of our energy and attention. Something that people don´t know is that, after you turn off the phone and close social media, it takes around 1 hour for your brain to self-regulate. That´s why when you close the phone, you feel bad. Your body is self-regulating after the dopamine bost that is engaging in social media.

For this I see two ways: Either you stick through that hour of feeling bad in the most stoic way you can meanwhile you do art. Or you go for a walk for 45min to 1h without phone and when you come back, go directly to do art.

Make sure, whenever you are doing art, your phone is out of your sight. Under the blanket, in another room, in silence or turned off. If you need digital references I personally put them on my tablet or I print them to have at hand.

Essentialy, to make these tricks work for you, you have to have some short of self-discipline. For that, is important for you to set specific goals that are managable, flexible and are really important to you.

Love,

Daniel Concheso.

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