Author: Alison M Williams

Creative block is something most of us arty types have to wrangle with at some time or other, for different lengths of time, a lot or a little, for a huge number of reasons.

It infuriates me beyond belief how frequently I get to a certain point in a painting I was so excited and hopeful about at the start and suddenly have no idea what to do next, though I know it’s not finished. 

I’ve thought a lot about this troubling affliction over this past couple of weeks and how much of a failure I have been feeling about still not having completed the painting for my colleague. 

Having trawled the internet, it’s comforting to find I’m very much not alone.  I’ve read lots of articles and watched YouTube videos, many artists have shared a wealth of thoughts and solutions for creative block and of course different methods will have different levels of success for each person, but I’d thought I’d compile a list of my favourites as well as things I’ve learnt through my own experience so it’s all in one place to refer back to and maybe others will find it useful too.  This is mainly relating to how I work on abstract paintings, but I’m sure a lot of it will be relevant to many other creative endeavours.

1. Take a break

I’ve seen this advice a lot.  I’m often guilty of ignoring this as it can feel frustrating when you want or need to get a painting finished but it is a necessary part of the process.  Don’t waste time fighting with your work if inspiration is not forthcoming, walk away and try again later. Forgive yourself, refuel and relax.

Some ideas for things to do when taking a break include: drink some water, eat some healthy food or take a vitamin, go for a walk, run or swim, go outside and look at nature, have a bath or shower, do a puzzle, do some housework, call a friend, watch something entertaining or go to bed!  Alternatively…

2. Play

There are sooo many ways to interpret this but essentially art should be fun! Lose any fears you have, do what feels good, keep it light and joyful and trust yourself and the process.  Stop chasing perfectionism and try to adopt a devil may care attitude. I’ve often found that some of my most successful work has been when I wasn’t putting any pressure on myself to do anything in particular, and it just happened!

Get out of your comfort zone and do some experiments- perhaps play with a different medium, textures or colour scheme. Explore or invent new techniques. Use a sketchbook. (Turns out there’s an awful lot to be said for using sketchbooks so that will be saved for another post!)

Give yourself a challenge. Some ideas:

10 minute/ 10 second drawing

Limit the materials or colour palette you’re going to use.

Paint what the way you’re currently feeling would look like.

Do something monochromatic.

Paint with something unusual like sticks or cotton buds, or use your fingers.

Paint to a song and paint what it would look like.

Paint pretending to be a 5 year old!

Paint something silly or deliberately try to make a bad painting then laugh at it!

Make a jar containing bits of paper with different ideas, techniques, colours etc written on them and pick one or more out for a random starting prompt.

Start a new piece of art or even more than one, it’s okay to have a number of works on the go at once, sometimes the solution to what’s wrong on one piece will arrive whilst working on another.

Use the time you’ve set aside to make art creatively, however you can. Do whatever you feel like as long as you’re not going days or weeks at a time without being creative.

3. Spend some time researching

Look through books, Pinterest, Facebook art groups and search the internet to find other art you like that inspires you, then compile a collection of your favourites to look back on whenever you need an inspiration boost. Think about how they have been created and practice replicating bits of other people’s work to get new ideas to inform your own.

Watch YouTube videos and tutorials about techniques, art theory and works in progress. Learn as much as you can about the elements of composition to truly understand why something might look ‘off’.

Sometimes I take a photo of a work in progress and do a Google image search on it to see what it shows me, I might get new ideas, find someone else’s work that I love or it might just let me know whether I’m on the right track for the feel of a piece I was aiming for and if it fits with other similar things I like. I have a Pinterest board for experiments/ work in progress which I use in the same way, as Pinterest will show you similar/related images underneath everything you click on.

Taking a look back through your sketchbooks can also remind you of things you want to try, recreate or continue working on and can often spark new ideas.

4. Do a ‘brain dump’

Write down all the thoughts you have about a piece, anything that might be bothering you or what could be causing the stagnation.  Write them randomly as they pop into your head in no particular order, it doesn’t have to be in lines on the page or look any particular way, just get the thoughts out until everything is exhausted.  I find this helps to release negative feelings and make sense of the whirling thoughts and sometimes new ideas and solutions arise.

5. Put some music on

Or a podcast, radio show or audiobook. Music especially can help shift your mood if that’s what’s getting in the way of being creative!

6. Teach someone else

I’ve often found that showing others how to achieve a particular technique or helping them learn to work with a new medium has helped me on my creative journey. It boosts confidence as you find out how much you do already know, it can reignite your passion as you are reminding yourself of things you love doing and can also spark new ideas, in the same way as if you…

7. Talk to other artists

Ask artistic friends to look at your work and give you their thoughts.  Bouncing ideas off someone else often helps to clarify things, gain a different perspective or generate wonderful new ideas.  There are lots of lovely artists on Facebook groups who will happily give feedback if requested, so it’s sometimes helpful to post works in progress.

The above should all help to be able to…

8. Look at it with fresh eyes

This could just mean after having taken that break and spending some time physically away from it, or it could be finding new ways to look at what you’ve done.  I often look at my work in the mirror or in photographs that I take regularly through the process to get a different perspective and sometimes it’ll give me a little spark of an idea.  Sometimes it helps to edit the photos and look at them in greyscale, as this can highlight imbalances in contrast/tone. 

Turning the piece on it’s side or upside down can help to see it in another way and can make an area that isn’t working more obvious.  Sometimes inspiration might strike and prompt you to add something, then when you turn it back the other way it feels better.

Try overlaying sections with pieces of paper to test whether it would be better without them and imagine what could be different. Squint at it. Try looking at it from much further away. Look at it in a literal different light!

9. Nurture self belief

Talk to yourself kindly. Look back at past work you were happy with, positive comments people made on things you posted online, think about any work that has sold or that other people have appreciated.

Pretend you know exactly what you’re doing (fake it ’til you make it!) and don’t let yourself get scared. The key thing is to lose the fear of it being a failure or a mess. Making mistakes is how we learn and grow, so embrace when it doesn’t go ‘right’. You can always just paint over it if you don’t like it and it will evolve into something else. Keep doing that until you do like it! Remember there is no such thing as perfection, some people will love something that others hate.

10. Practical Steps

It can help before you begin a piece to set some boundaries for yourself so it doesn’t get too overwhelming, for example, choose a limited colour palette, number of materials, size, theme etc. Come up with a brief for yourself.

Keep going. Take the pressure off by taking small steps. Begin on a ‘stuck’ piece by only committing to doing a tiny bit, even if it’s just one mark, or telling yourself you’re just going to spend 10 minutes on it. Often that’s enough to get you in to creative mode and you find you don’t want to stop. Try working on a few paintings at time, alternating and doing just a little on each.

Collaborate with the piece and ask it questions as if it were a living entity. Let it speak to you and tell you what it needs. Does it want a bit more red in that corner? A splash of something contrasting near the top left? Is there enough drama, or too much? Imagine alternatives- what if this grey section had a pop of lime green? Would that light area be better if it were darker?

Stand back a lot and look at the piece as a whole as you work.

Ask yourself why you don’t like the bits you don’t like. Start working on the bit you dislike the most, then move on to the next ‘worst’ bit.

Try making a drastic change, perhaps something you wouldn’t have naturally been inclined to do, like adding a chunk of a colour you weren’t planning to use or covering over a large section. It can be scary to paint over something you’ve already put time and effort into, not knowing whether what you may do will be better or worse, but if it wasn’t working anyway, what do you have to lose? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again!

Switch things up a bit, use different tools or brushes to apply the paint differently and make different kinds of marks. Try working faster than usual. Try using your non dominant hand, or even your foot, or mouth!

Try not to get too attached to what you’ve done too early on, this can stifle your creativity by making you too protective of parts of it, which can prevent the free flow of mark making and you can ‘clam up’, which stops it becoming what it was destined to be!

Let go of the thoughts of what it was going to end up like in your head before you began. Let it evolve and grow naturally.

There are no failed paintings, only unfinished ones with endless possibilities, so never give up!

Phew. Now I’ll surely never get stuck again!?! What do you do to get rid of creative block? I’d love to hear from anyone who can add any other pearls of wisdom, please leave me a comment 😊

I have spent the last week pondering the seemingly huge question of how to break creative block and ended up going down quite the rabbit hole, so I have a whole load of thoughts on paper which I will be organising and posting soon.

For now, this is my creative activity over the past few days…

I don’t have much to say about this other than the fact that I had an urge to do something different, with paint and pens and I wanted to try and work quickly, without inhibitions.  It was an experiment in overcoming creative block.  I kind of like it!

I then made this piece to go in a frame my friend gave me so I can give it back to her (for decluttering purposes, mainly!):

And lastly I needed to make a birthday card for my friend who is colourblind, so I doodled with primary colours as I heard that they are most easily seen and I know he finds differentiating between red and green hard. I then cut a section out of the doodle and framed it on the front of the card. I already gave him the card so here is what is left!

I was trying so hard not to be precious and create freely. Overall I think it looks an awful mess but there are a few interesting sections when they’re isolated with a viewfinder so I’m calling it a success!

Cheerio for now 😊

This week I have been trying to work on about 7 different pieces, thinking if I just keep doing a little bit on each and then moving on, eventually I will get them finished. The trouble is I get sidetracked and keep beginning more new pieces, so the frame and canvas graveyard is probably going to be around for a while!

I seem to get to a point with most of my work where I get stuck and then I have to put them aside for a while. I think over the next week I will try and find tips online on how to combat this and collate them on my post next week!

Anyhoo, I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked due to being poorly with a very nasty migraine, but here are this week’s offerings:

This little thing (14.5cm x 9.5cm) was one I started this week after my previous experiments with rustiness. Here I have utilised some lovely painty old baby wipes, some silica gel balls, some old cement and a couple of heart shapes I created ages ago with some wall filler and pizza boxes.

I’ve also been trying to work on my rainbow coloured piece for my colleague but alas I have still not broken through the creative block… however, I did make this bright and cheerful thing whilst I was trying to figure it out. This was one I started months ago.

It’s 51cm x 20.5cm. Made with something from an old necklace, a curtain ring, tissue paper, some bits of bandage from when my friend’s son broke his arm (!) and old tile grout. The canvas was being thrown in the bin by a charity shop.

Maybe I should just do a series of ‘practice’ pieces and see if he likes any of them instead?!

Well I still haven’t had any divine inspiration for my colleague’s piece and have been periodically looking at it in puzzlement all week 🙃 I’m beginning to wonder if a complete paint over is in order 🥴

Fortunately, it hasn’t stopped me creating altogether as I thought I ought to make a start on another painting a friend has asked me to do. I thought this one might be easier as she didn’t really give me any criteria for what she wanted. I knew she liked another piece that a mutual friend of ours has and that her living room has lots of red decor, so I came up with a spiral heart design that uses similar techniques to those I used for our friend’s piece. I have always loved the colour red but for some reason am not often moved to use it in my paintings so I have been tinkering around with ways of using different shades and doing some red doodles.

Anyway here is the painting so far. It still has a long way to go and I’m really not sure whether I like the spiral or not!

I’ve actually worked on quite a few different bits and bobs this week. My arty neighbour and friend Jan and I have begun travelling altered books, so I did the first page of that and we swapped them over yesterday. The idea is that we have an old book each and we choose a word from the page we intend to work on and create something based on that word, then we swap them over and respond to what the other has done. I can’t wait to get going with mine now as Jan had done a beautiful page based on the word ‘agate’. So lots of possibilities with inspiration from rocks and crystals there, right up my street!

I also had another go at a piece which has had a few incarnations already. I’m not sure why but it’s one of those that is proving to be hard work!

I’ve decided it’s going to be a case of layers upon layers until it feels done with this one!

I’m not sure if I mentioned before but my Mum gave me an awesome Christmas present- a ‘one sketch a day’ journal. I am usually dreadful at making myself draw even though I know how important it is to draw regularly as an artist and I was a teeny bit daunted by the idea of having to do it every single day as I’m also usually dreadful at sticking to things like that! I decided to take it as something fun, that I wouldn’t put any pressure on myself with and that I would just see what comes out each day and so far, I’ve absolutely loved doing it! I think it’s really helping to keep me in a creative mindset so I intend to continue. I think it’ll be great to look back on a year’s worth of drawings and see what happened from one day to the next 😊 Maybe I’ll do a post at the end of the year showing my favourites.

I have a couple of finished pieces to show this week, I got all excited about trying to make things look rusty, so these happened…

I might change the frame as it’s a little too deep really and takes away from being able to see how vibrant the colours are.

Here was some of the process…

I was so engrossed I forgot to take many pictures! I didn’t use many materials, just a baby wipe that had been used to wipe up some spilt hair dye, some old cement sand mixed with paint, some old tissue paper and a variety club charity heart badge which I removed the pin from. I quite like how it turned out but felt it could have looked more authentically rusty, so I then continued working on my old cake board…

It turns out old cake boards make great canvases! I just need to find something to put on the back so it can hang.

I definitely want to work on the rustiness technique more, I was looking at lots of rusty paint pictures on Pinterest and there’s so much more I can explore with this.

Some pics of how this evolved:

My mission for the coming week will be to continue with the two commision paintings I have on the go and to see if I can get at least one of my other unfinished paintings done and dusted. My studio space looks like a frame and canvas graveyard! I have a bit of a problem! 🫣

Hello again, well, this week has been a very busy week full of creativity and I’m pleased to say I finally finished the pyrographed box I’d been working on for my best friend Liz. It took a very long time but that might have been because of the cheap tool I was using, may have to invest in a proper pyrography kit! Anyway, here it is, along with the original drawing which I coloured for her as well:

As I said before, I was aiming to finish a painting I have been working on for one of my colleagues this week, unfortunately it still isn’t done but I have added a fair amount to it this weekend, I’ll have to give you a work in progress picture instead:

For some reason my camera doesn’t seem to pick up the green shades in this that well, it looks a lot bluer here than it does in person.

It needs an enormous amount more work and it’s really puzzling me, I can’t seem to get ideas very quickly with it. It’s probably because it’s something I’ve been asked to do, I seem to go to pieces with the pressure of a commission! I worry so much that the recipient won’t like it that I can’t seem to make decisions!

So instead of focusing on that all weekend as I intended to, I upcycled a hair clip, re-made a brooch from ages ago that I wasn’t happy with and painted another small painting, just so I wouldn’t fail my goal of one painting per week! Oh, and I started working on a new painting which I’m doing on an old cake board.

I may redo some of the hearts on the hair clip, it was my first time using Lisa Pavelka’s Magic Gloss and I think I could improve upon them. This hairclip’s been hanging around for years waiting for me to fix it, it originally had pink heart gems but one had fallen out, so I made a mould of one of the remaining ones and had a play with the resin stuff and adding some other bits. The green and blue ones are a bit iffy!

The brooch turned out okay though, I used the magic gloss on that too as a varnish and it gives a much nicer effect. It’s made of cut out pizza box hearts, paper mâché, old beads, paint and glitter with a brooch back I got in a pack from a charity shop. I made a whole load of them a few years ago to go on valentines cards but I never really felt they looked professional enough, so I’ll have to go back and redo the others now!

So here’s my painting for the week, which I have called, ‘Procrastinocean’!

Maybe I’ll have the courage to finish my colleague’s piece before I see him at work on Friday!

See you next week 😊

Hello again 😊

So with my new year’s challenge in mind, I have been frantically trying to finish a painting each week and have produced 2 odd looking things…

I had had both of them on the go for a very long time but somehow had gotten either stuck or bored, I’m not sure which but both had ended up in the growing doom pile of unfinished work. I don’t know whether I really feel like either of them are finished enough, but I usually feel that way about my work, whatever it is, so, I’m calling them done anyway.

The first image in the heart frame was just made to fit the frame, which I found at a car boot sale and thought was cute as I’ve always loved anything heart shaped. It’s composed of a plastic sweet packet which I covered with tissue paper then burnt holes in, a twisty tie thing that might have been holding cables together at some point, some old beads, a washer with a pretty patina that I’ve just stuck on as it was rather than painting over it as I like it so much, some old cement and tile grout, and acrylic paint.

The second image seemed to take a ridiculous amount of time… lots of layers of paint on this, the colours were inspired by this bracelet that I found, also at a car boot sale:

There’s plenty of junk in this piece including a weird circular plastic thing I found on the pavement, (not a clue what it was for) a large stick-on rhinestone, a strange circular bead, some little balls from one of those silica gel packets (I often use these) some old cement and a baby wipe (which hadn’t been used for anything disgusting!)

I usually start by layering up the texture and then painting over the whole thing, and this one I was really happy with until I started painting it, then I struggled to get it looking as nice as the unpainted version, so I think that put me off finishing it. It also outgrew the frame I had planned for it, well the mount anyway- I kept adding more to the edges to try and balance it out a bit and then it didn’t look right within the aperture! So I will have to make a new mount.

I think they both look better in person, it’s quite difficult to capture all the detail and texture.

The plan for this week is to try and finish a commission that one of my colleagues asked me to do many months ago as I’ve taken way too long over it. It’s very colourful so I’m actually really looking forward to working on it and seeing what it becomes. I have a lot of other things happening and I’m going to be very busy but hopefully I will be posting it here next Sunday!