I recently posed the question on social media asking what people wanted to know about me and many of you asked “where do you get your inspiration from? Honestly there are so many wonderful avenues I could share about this question that I will expand on this through many blog posts.
I will do my best to learn and share a bit about my process and how I came to be the artist I am today.
I feel that I find inspiration everywhere and in everything in my life, however it wasn’t always this way. It took time to harness that “creative flow” and to remember when it happens is important because it comes in so many different forms.
I learned that ”difficulty” can inspire this creative flow, in the desire to achieve something you’ve never done before, even through failure. This can also diminish drive if you allow the failure to diminish your drive instead of seeing it as the necessary process of growth. I feel once you’ve pushed past that difficulty and you reach your desired outcome, then you’re hooked into this new found drive, because the dopamine response has rewritten your schema into knowing that after the struggle comes the reward, and in turn creating and inspiration. So do the stuff that makes you struggle.
I like to tell artists, “Difficulty is like lifting weights for your creativity.” To cry and draw till your eyes hurt, to do the art that causes you to go through 10 erasers till you get it right. I will never stop learning and I will never be satisfied with my art. I’m completely fine with that.
I’ve always felt compelled to draw the things I love from an early age. This desire to recreate something I admired, but it was the unexpected outcome and the story that my creation was revealing to me; intern creating within me the addiction to manifest creations of my subconscious. Creating something I didn’t even know about myself and something that is the only one in all existence became my entertainment.
One of the earliest memories I have of artistic struggle was when I was about 5 years old. I wanted to draw something I saw in life and not just what was in my imagination. At the time I had been drawing lots of mermaids, princesses riding horses and rainbows. I was watching TV and a Lucky Charms commercial came on and I loved the part where the rainbow met the pot of gold. It was then I ran to get paper and all I wanted to do was recreate this image I just saw. I drew in the clouds (cotton balls in the sky) and this colorful rainbow going all the way down to this pot of gold, however as I drew this pot it just kept looking to me like a piece of toast, I was getting frustrated and for the first time I could draw what I saw in my head. no matter how many times I erased and redrew it, it just wasn’t right. I eventually became so frustrated I gave up. This was my first failure. I remember that desire to get it right and I began to see more difficult projects. This was my first form of inspiration, to draw what I couldn’t.
Inspiration is defined by the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. If you find you need help finding some inspiration then look to your core values and imagine you’d like to visually tell a story about one of those. Even if you don’t think of yourself as creative or an artist, everyone’s life should be inspiring to be in and if it’s not, then for practice everyday, imagine that everything you see is significant and to remember just one of those moments at the end of a day; the way the light passes through the trees at the golden hour before sunset or the ways the birds start to sing just as the sun is about to rise. I hope you are more inspired now and find more ways to be inspired.
