I get it. Sometimes it is hard to wrap your brain around maintaining fresh inspirations for your work. Creative blocks are real y’all and as a professional artist, they are scary as shit. Fear spirals into monkey mind trying to become inspired, worrying about whether or not you will ever have another awesome idea ever again. OMG AM I EVEN AN ARTIST ANYMORE!!!!!! I have my fair share and have written a couple of post about them here and here and here. 

Breathe, chickpea. Grab a glass of wine if you need to (It is 9:15am here… Make it champaign and call it brunch). You’ve still got it. We just need to give your creative side some warm, gentle love to coax it out from behind your thinking brain. You see it is so easy to look for inspirations by finding a visual to copy, or analyzing a detail that logically would make your work better. This is an inspiration engineered by your left brain. It may add something to your work. But what really makes your work awesome is when you listen to what your heart and gut are telling you to do. This is how your right brain communicates with you. But sometimes those right brain messages are not coming through.

So today I am sharing 3 inspirations that I personally have found help bust my creative blocks, and crank up the volume on what my right-brain is trying to tell me.

Decide today you are just going to play.

All kids are artist. Yep. Kids know how to do the art thing naturally. Growing up and spending so much time in our left brains, is where we forget how to really listen to our intuitive creative side. But, kids they are in the process of getting to know all the feelings so all that emotion is raw and unfiltered. They have emotion driven opinions about it all from crayons, to cartoon characters, snack options and school subjects. For the most part all they do is driven by how they feel and their subconscious. Unfortunately they have not developed the motor skills to translate all that raw creative material into art. But you have. You just need to learn how to harness creative fuel like they do. So today just decide you are going to play. It doesn’t even have to be fiber related, or even art related just do something that will make you feel like a kid again. (my favorite is hiking to the nearest swimming hole)

Take the day to be inside your body.

I am so very guilty of extreme monkey mind at the most inappropriate times. My left brain goes into overdrive and rest assured it has a lot of criticism about what the right brain is doing. Working with your right brain is more about going with your gut and your heart and getting out of your head. So if you find you are way in your head, step away from your art for the day, and find a way to ground yourself back into your body. Exercise, take a walk or yoga. Even some hard-core, work-up-a-sweat cardio is really good. Or go slower like meditation. Last week I shared a guided meditation to help pull your awareness back into your body.

Forget what it looks like how does it make you feel.

Sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in how art looks. I know that sounds like crazy talk, since art is all about visuals. But if a piece is not “looking right” it more often than not has to do with how you feel when you look at it. The visuals are just minor details that are more mercurial than you may realize in relationship to the vibe of a piece as a whole. It is so very easy to get caught up in the left brain analysis of the details, that you lose sight of the direction your gut/heart (right brain) is trying to lead you. You may need to just step back from from your work for a while (go ahead, cast on something new…) and come back to it later. What usually happens it your subconscious (right brain) will work out a new solution, or you will see your work with a new appreciation for the new direction that it is taking.

So my question for you… What do you do when you feel creatively blocked? Share in the comments below or head over to the UrbanGypZ facebook page and share with us there.