How to Get (and Stay) Inspired
Updated: Mar 3
Any artist’s nightmare is the lack of inspiration. Missing motivation, missing ideas, missing the spirit…Things that make you feel uncomfortable and unsatisfied, but they don’t have to dominate your work process.
Generally, try to observe the environment in which you retrieve inspiration from the most. Is it a place that is familiar to you or rather the unknown? Do you find it in sensations and emotions or ideas and new perspectives on discussion topics? The factors can vary from your mood to the people you surround yourself with to the time of the day. Tracking your inspiration flow and finding out the pattern can be a beneficial tool for initiating your creative work.
But let’s say you want to get inspired right in the moment and don’t want to or simply don’t have the time to wait and observe when a muse strikes you. There are several tools that might aid you in that case. Searching for prompts or small activities that prescribe a topic or an element which needs to be incorporated into the piece could be one option. Others are exposing yourself to a type of genre or art, either from the same art medium or a different one, i.e. if you’re a poet reading other forms of poetry or instead looking at sculptures. Apart from that, you can take part in art challenges on social media. A popular one for example is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but there are plenty of others. Other than that, you can challenge yourself to use unconventional tools to create a piece, for instance using only a spoon as an instrument or painting with fruit juices in various colors.
There are many resources on the internet that can be drawn on, from lists of activities to prompt generators. They can be great not only for finding inspiration but also expanding your repertoire of art, developing your abilities, and perhaps figuring out what truly ignites the flame of creativity in you.
