Feeling Creatively Stuck: Some Thoughts About My Art and Fan Art

I don’t know how obvious it is in my posts on this blog, but right now I feel creatively stuck. For over ten years, I’ve posted anything I made online. After all these years, I feel… stuck. As I write this post, I don’t know where my life is heading (Except my health (Including my eczema) is doing much better and my house had work done to it) and I feel very nervous about it. In the meantime, I didn’t feel very creative. I didn’t want to draw, sketch, sew, or anything else. I also found myself comparing myself to people I see online and wondered why I though I was good enough at whatever I did to post online.

The thing is, after years of posting online, I learned there isn’t any way to make everyone happy. This is especially important for the kind of art I post. Artists online seems to have their own trends depending on what is going on online. For an example, creating fan art for a certain movie will cause fans of the movie to pay attention to your art. The problem is if the fans of the movie don’t like your art except for the fan art for the movie, they won’t follow or subscribe to your profile.

This is something I’ve been struggling with for years. Fifteen years ago, creating fan art of your favorite TV shows, movies, books, and more were a great way to drive attention to your art. In hindsight, I think it would be a good way to show off someone’s skills and appreciation for an already existing media, but doing too much fan art will not show off their skills as an artist in other ways. Even though this is something I tried to avoid, I feel frustrated (Both back then and today) that I never posted anything I created that was just normal art. Sadly, the art I wanted to post was not always with me where I lived and I didn’t have the ability to create scans of it for posting online or for sale. So, I was (And still am) stuck with posting art I worked on at my home… which included fan art.

Even though it is important to me to post this art, I, like I said before, have been creatively stuck. I don’t feel inspired to do anything but clean and organizing my house (Which is badly needed). In an attempt to make myself get out of this creative slump, I began to force myself to draw and sketch again. Usually this goes well, but I hate my chosen subject matter: Still life.

I don’t mind still life drawings. Sometimes I really enjoy them more than sketching and digitally painting humans. It is also my favorite subject to get myself out of a creative rut. This time, it’s not doing it for me. In fact, I absolutely hate it. I’ve created so many still life art over the years that I’m now tired of it. I want something else to focus on to motivate me to sketch and digitally paint again. I just don’t know what it is right now.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!

Featured Image by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash.com. Edited by me.