Alex Heizer

December 14, 2010 Comments | 18 notes | Text

6 Tips for Keeping Creative

For an artist, being creative is sometimes the most important thing in life. It can sustain you through periods of no work, periods of no food, bad relationships, bad breakups, but also through times of prosperity and the greatest love of your life. However, sometimes we lose our mojo and the creativity seems to have taken a permanent vacation.

So how can you keep from getting stagnant and make sure your creativity remains fresh and full of passion? Here are a few things which have helped me in the past and you only need to experiment with them, not permanently switch. The one common theme for all of them is CHANGE!

Try different materials. Specialize in oils? Get a stick and draw in the dirt. Love the subtle greys of graphite pencils? Try fingerpainting. Are you a sculptor? Watercolors would be a good change of pace. The specifics don’t matter, the idea is to step outside your comfort zone and use an unfamiliar material.
Choose a different subject. Instead of still lifes do a self-portrait. Take a break from science fiction ships and robots to make a series of cartoons for a Sunday paper. Again, the important thing is to embrace the unfamiliar.
Change your studio. Leave your drafting table and draw outside on a park bench. Even moving to a different room than you normally create in will give you different lighting and environmental cues.
Mess with your palette. Switch from black & white to color, or vice versa. Choose a random limited palette from colourlovers.com. Toss all of your pastels into a box and randomly grab 7 of them for a composition.
Pick a different style. If you’re a realist, go abstract. A cubist? Create the next Mona Lisa!
For those truly stuck in a creative desert, mix and match multiple tips above.

Often we get comfortable with all the things we enjoy creating. Each of these tips will challenge you to look differently at your art, your processes and the world around you. Once you go back to how you normally create, you’ll be able to see it from a different perspective with new ideas that will influence your creativity. And that will keep your art fresh.

Have any other tips from your own experiences? Let me know!

Sketched on my iPhone