★ TYROTOXISM

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

-Chuck Close

Image from Wisdom

This is not an opinion. I know this is completely true…when I went through a shitty four-year art block before college, simply pushing myself to create/draw more is what broke it. Back then, I forgot a lot of the things I loved, and why they were worth loving (TBH, I think this is when I got really angry and tired of myself being an animu artist/liking anime, and tried force myself to stop by BLOCKING OUT ALL MY ANIMU INFLUENCES and doing other styles…..but they were all really ugly LOL). So whenever I sat down to draw, my mind literally went blank. I got really depressed, and I never wanted to draw anymore, because I thought it was too much work to think of an “original style”.

But now I realize I shouldn’t worry about that. I’d rather have any style of art than that stupid art block, and no art at all. What broke my block was a combination of art college forcing me to draw, paint, brainstorm, sculpt, animate, and create every single day, which then forced me to look around for references. Eventually I found some new influences and sources of inspiration. But what really inspired me were my college roomies and friends. THEY INTRODUCED ME TO SO MANY NEW THINGS/IDEAS/FANDOMS LOL, and they are ALL so amazingly talented and driven… but only real secret I learned from watching them work is that I simply wasn’t getting off my ass to WORK enough!!!!

So yeah to anyone who feels depressed or blocked with their art, just know that there will always be dark or stagnant moments, but you can always get through them if you just keep going. And sometimes you just need to refresh your influences, find something new to love that you’ve never experienced before. I personally believe that’s what makes art happen in the first place. But again, if you don’t know how to do that, JUST DON’T STOP and you’ll find that in time :D

(Source: wearethedigitalkids)

Posted on February 7th at 10:02 PM
Tagged as: okay shutting up now. YOU CAN DO IT. okay REALLY shutting up now.
Reblogged from: cryptovolans
Originally posted by: wearethedigitalkids