How To Create Through an Art Slump

1. Introduction: Have you ever found yourself in an art slump? You want to create but just can't think of what to create? You try to create something, but nothing really works into anything worth continuing. Hi, I'm Elizabeth and welcome to my class, How to work through an art slump. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator, as well as a published author, Illustrator. In 2020, I began teaching for Skillshare, Developing classes that explore art techniques and art making approaches that are filled with fun, experimentation. Normally I'm filled with creative ideas. I love picking up an art medium and just running with it. Sometimes though, I find myself in a place where I want to create. I want to play with art materials and experiment. But for some reason I just can't get excited about the things I try. I end up feeling even more discouraged and long, all the more for when art making came easy. What do I do when I'm in an art slump? In this class, we're going to learn techniques and strategies to reignite our creative energies. We'll experiment and play through those unsuccessful art moments. And most important of all, we'll just keep creating. Because when we find ourself in an art slump, the worst thing we can do is nothing at all. It may seem like a good idea to walk away from your art table, and I'm sure you have plenty of other things that you can do with your time while you're waiting for creativity and artistic motivation to return. But for me, not making art is not a good thing. I need to consistently create something, because otherwise, I find myself in an even worse place than an art slump. So let's learn how to overcome our art slumps together and get back to the joys of art making waiting for us on the other side. This class is intended for creatives of all levels because at some point in your artistic journey, you are going to face an art slump. And these strategies and techniques will guarantee that you can navigate that calmly for as long as it may take. And get back to the fun of creating art again, by the end of this class, you'll have a variety of ways that you can create through an art slump. Strategies to keep you coming back to the art table when that place isn't one that currently brings you joy. And one day find that because we kept on creating, we returned to our art happy place. I hope you'll join me in class. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining me for our class project. We are going to work through several different exercises and art approaches that aim at keeping us creating in a low stakes way as we work our way through our art slump to get to the other side. These are four different approaches that can be used in combination separately, any way you choose, but they can also be used outside of an art. They are wonderful, warm and inspiration boosts that I think you're really going to enjoy. Let's send it over to the next lesson to take a look at what art supplies you might want to have on hand for class there. 3. Materials: Now let's talk about what art supplies you might want to have on hand for class. Really truly, the sky is the limit. And the great thing about this is you can work with whatever art supplies you already have on hand. But if you needed a reason to get out to an art supply store or make a place an order online, who am I to discourage you from adding to your art supply? What I do recommend though, is that you have a mix of dry media and wet media, so that you have some variation as well as whatever surfaces you're going to need to work with those types of media. So let's check that out in more detail. You're going to want to have drawing paper or watercolor mixed media paper of some sort because we are going to be working with drying materials as well as wet materials for some painting. Canson mixed media paper is a paper that I often use because as a mixed media artist, I'm never really sure when I begin a piece what materials are going to end up being incorporated into it. So mixed media is a good way to go. A lot of our exercises that we're going to do are going to weave through a variety of art media. So a mixed media paper is a great choice, but drawing paper will also work well. You might want to have on hand some different markers. Sharpies are wonderful. Fine liners are great. You can even incorporate ballpoint pens, colored pencils, graphite pencils, water soluble pencils, watercolor pencils, charcoal pencils, soft pestel, charcoal sticks, water color. I've got pan sets. I've also got some palettes where I put my tube paint into some watercolor brushes. We're going to need something to activate our water colors. I love to use a spray bottle. I'm also going to want to have a cup of water on hand as well as a cloth, and then I also like to incorporate ink. You can also use India ink. If really the sky is the limit. I do want to make sure that I have a ruler as well as glue. I've got some glue sticks. I've got some liquid white glue. And then I'm going to want to have some tape on hand. I really love washi tape, but painter's tape will work as well. You could also use acrylic paint if you wanted to guash what materials you incorporate into the exercises that we're going to do are going to depend on what materials you have on hand. The ultimate focus is you're going to need a surface to create on, so some sort of paper. You're going to want to have some drying materials and some painting materials so that you can play with dry material and wet material and weaving those together. And we're going to be doing some collage, so you can tear that or you can cut that with scissors. So basically we're drawing, we're painting, we're collaging, we're mixed medying. We're going to be doing a ton of stuff and having a really good time as we work through our art slumps. Take some time to gather up your art supplies and I'll meet you in the next lesson where we will begin working through our art slum. See you there. 4. Exercise 1 Limitations: Welcome back. Often when we're in an art slump, we are easily overwhelmed by having too many options. In this exercise, we are going to play with limitations. There are many ways to use limitations to inspire creativity. This doesn't have to just be an exercise that you pull out during an art slump. This can be an exercise that you use at any point in time in your creative journey. It's a really fun one. I've put together a list of limitation ideas that you can find on the projects and resources section of class. I hope you'll turn to them as inspiration and guidance the next time you aren't sure what to create and maybe even when you're experiencing your next arts tation. And we're going to work through three different limitation exercises in this lesson to see what comes out of that. Our first limitation is that we're only going to be able to create lines. If you think about line and you think of all the different kinds of line that there are, there's all sorts of lines. Straight lines. We have horizontal lines, and we have vertical lines. We have angled lines, we have wavy lines, zigzag lines, dotted lines, dashed lines, broken lines. So you can decide how limiting you want to be in this one. You might end up creating something that is very surprising and very different from what you normally create. And that is a wonderful way to strip away the expected and really create something that is a new aspect of you as an artist. We're going to only work with lines, but I'm going to let myself have a little fun. I have a variety of different pens here of different widths. I also grab some colors that make me happy. So I'm going to create a picture that is just randomly composed of different kinds of lines, and we're going to see what comes out of it. And I encourage you to either do this along with me or watch and then circle back and do it on your own. Afterward. I tend to be a little bit more loose and organic, so I'm going to start by being very angular and geometric. And I'm going to change my pen frequently so that I get some nice variety in here. I do very much like parallel lines. I also like repetition that makes me happy. And the ultimate goal is to create through our art slump and get back to our art happy place. Even though I'm encouraging you to go out of your comfort zone, I'm also encouraging you to play with the very simple things in art making that bring you joy. Because ultimately we want to get back to that joy in creating. But it is bringing me happiness. That's huge, because that was not happening the other day when I realized I was in an art slump. Let's see, let's add some color in here. Okay, if it's a little wonky, we're not making an artwork, we're just playing with art. I'm just going to keep continuing to add more line details. Changing up the color of the color pencil I'm working with as well as the thickness of the lines I'm creating. An easy way to do this is to just put in a bunch of lines and then between two lines fill it in and then you've magically got a thicker line in your artwork, which is really fabulous. Line weight is a really good way to add some variety will still sticking to the same limitation of line. The same goes for line color, line thickness through different pen thicknesses, as well as line length and types of line. Of course, the next limitation that I want to play around with is shape. I'm going to be doing this whole piece just using the idea of squares and rectangles. It's super loose as far as whether it's a square, whether it's rectangle. But I'm just roughly creating that type of angular shape with my Sharpie. And now I'm going back in with my fine liner. Playing with the idea of overlap length with changing anything I can about it so that I still maintain the limitation. But I'm also still creating an interesting composition and having a ton of different variety. Because that way I'm really pushing how far I can take this limitation and having a lot of fun with it. Because who doesn't love to just draw the same thing over and over and over again? Then I decided I want to add some color. So I got it to Pasca paint pen and I'm just doing the same thing I was doing before, but now I'm doing it with the Pasca paint pen, continuing to overlap. Play with size, scale, position. Continually turning the paper so that I find new areas where I can pop in some additional stuff. And then I want to do the same limitation of shape. But now I want to explore circles. There's so many different ways to play with circles. I'm starting out with just colored pencils and getting those in, switching over to Posca, because that gives me a different look with the different media. As well as that bold pop of black line for my circles there, going back and forth between media as I see a need in the image that's evolving. And then also doing the same thing where I thickened up the lines from the line limitation, but now I'm doing it by thickening up. The outlined edges of my circles. Not being afraid to play around with filling in certain spaces. Not worrying about being terribly accurate or neat or measured. Just having fun with different ideas and concepts within the limitation that I've set for myself. The cool thing about overlapping shapes is that you create other smaller shapes and it helps segment your paper. It's a really nice way to take the overwhelming idea of a blank page and quickly conquer that by breaking that up and creating new interesting shapes and sections and pieces to play with. Then I decided to go back in with some micron pen, and I wanted to expand it a bit. The limitation is our starting point, but that doesn't ever mean that we're stuck with that limitation. I decided to go in with some line work, playing with some radial quality as well as some parallel lines in there. Just to add another interesting detail with the thinner line work versus the thicker line work. And creating some really nice repetitive pattern and texture in a different field. In some parts compared to the open sections versus the solid color sections versus the line sections. And playing with different kinds of line that I can put into those sections to keep pushing myself and adding more visual interest. Then as I discover new ways to work back into this piece, I'm using those ideas and inspirations to further push the ideas. I'm thickening up the outer edges of some of my circles. I'm filling them in with my posca, paint black. Just pushing the boundaries of color and value and line, weight and circle quality until I feel that the piece is done. Because really it's all evolving in a very organic way. I don't really have a goal in mind other than to keep creating and to work with my limitation as the inspiration and jumping off point as I discover new interesting things along the way. I'm playing with continuing that with other media, other colors. Just continuing to add to the piece until it feels resolved. Doing the same thing with an orange pasta to, I ended up going with a warm color scheme and that high contrast black and white. That wasn't intentional. I just started grabbing colors that called to me and sounded like they wanted to have some art fun today. Now that one's done a couple more. Oh, I did decide to add in a couple thin Pascal pasta, some thin fine liner edges, just to add some more line variety, but also to have some more darker pops. That one's done. Now I want to do another limitation. I'm going to use very minimal color. I'm only going to use various oranges that I have in different media, as well as black and then the white of the paper. And then I wanted to limit myself to only the kinds of lines I could create using a ruler. In the other line one, I let the lines be wonky. I let it just go on there as it wanted to. This one I'm really creating some crisp, clean, intentional lines. But each line is leading to the next line as I figure out where else to make the marks. Turning the paper constantly, adding in different stuff. Now I put the ruler aside, and I'm using those initial lines as guide marks to help me create some crispi lines as I go in with a light orange pasta to make some dashed lines of varying lengths. Just to continually break up the space mirror, the same loose grid idea, and just letting the piece evolve bit by bit. Then it felt like it needed a little something more. So I decided to add some gradients in there with colored pencil. Still following my limited orange, black and white color scheme. And turning the page and just adding gradients anywhere feels right. There's really no rhyme or reason to it. There's no rule I'm following other than looking for interesting sections that have a defined rectangular shape and then starting bold and fading it out quickly with the colored pencil. Then I had another fine liner orange that was a little bolder than the light orange I'm going in and mirroring the original dash lines just to double those up. But also still have a little bit of contrast and variety between the types of oranges that I'm using with those same fine liners. And then I got up my orange Posca pen and got the ruler back out to continue the work that I was doing with my Sharpie. But now I'm doing it with the orange Posca pen. I'm adding some boulder orange lines right over the top of everything. Very much playing with layers and overlap and repetition and random yet controlled aspects of the limitation. For this one, that's very much about jumping back and forth for me regardless of whether I'm doing a limitation or not. Same idea as the light orange pencil. Now I'm going in with my more standard middle of the road orange pencil and just finding new areas to pop in some gradients with that media. Repeating a technique, changing up the material a little bit, but still trying to work to have some fun, keep to the limitation, but explore new ways that I can add more into this piece to continue to add visual interest and get me inspired and excited about art making and just keep creating. And then I decided to go in with some black fine liner. So I'm using the spaces that are available to put in some longer lines, but playing with line variety. And then I really wanted some more texture like repeated lines is a really wonderful way to do that. So I started putting in some varying length sections of fine line or black line so I could have some areas that had a little bit more going on. So it wasn't just so spaced out and calm. It kind of gives a little bit of vibration almost feeling in those sections and adds a little bit more visual interest. And all of these are things that I can continue to explore in my art making. They're giving me lots of great ideas for future projects as I get through my art slump and get back into art making. In our next Ilson, we are going to explore another way to create through our art slump, relying on the fun of randomness. See soon. 5. Exercise 2 Randomness: In our last lesson, you've got to choose your limitation. Now we're having some control, but we're also really relying on randomness to spark our creative practice and get us going. We're going to have some fun incorporating randomness into our art making. The first step is to write down on a sheet of paper a list of art materials, techniques, subject matters. It could be limitations if that was something you really enjoyed. But I've also provided a list for you that you can use and add to that is on the projects and resources section of what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to cut those up into slips of paper and fold them, and then put them into category bowls. So you're going to have a category bowl for subject matter, a category bowl for art media, and a category bowl for art techniques. And you can add as many other categories as you want to, but have at least those three. And then we are going to draw one from each bowl. And then using at least those three slips of paper, whatever they say, we are going to create something for as little or as long a time as you would like. This is a really fun way to use art prompts in a low stakes way and to get you doing some unusual things that probably wouldn't naturally come out in your own art making practice because you can personalize this, you can include things that you really enjoy working with. Also put some surprise ones in there, some ones that maybe aren't your strong suit or your comfort zone. And really challenge yourself as you draw the different slips of paper and come up with new ways to create using those random concepts. I've written out my list of different materials, subject matters, concepts, art techniques, what have you that I want to pull from cutting those up into slips. And then I'm going to pull those up and get them organized into my three categories of subject, art, media, and concept or technique piles. Give them a good mix and you're ready for the next step. Then I just grabbed a sketchbook that I have on hand. This is watercolor paper. You could use any kind of paper you want to, but I don't know what's coming out of these bowls. I decided to go for a paper that was a little thicker, and I haven't worked at the sketchbook for a while. It was a good opportunity to do that. Let's pick out some random slips of paper and get to creating. You can work along with me and use whatever I draw out or you're more than welcome to set up your own bowls and do this at another time. After you've watched the video. See, we have oh, architecture, not something I often do water color for, a technique that I need to incorporate two neutral colors. Also something I don't normally do. Okay, I'm going to put these off to the side and I'm going to grab my water colors and get started. All right? I've got a couple of brushes. I've got a tray of water colors that I had used in a class years ago that has some more neutral colors on there. I've got a container of water. Hey, I'm going to grab a couple other art materials in more neutral tones. So I'm going to grab some colored pencils. Some browns. I've got some, three different browns, grays, grayish browns, warm browns. I also happen to have some brush signed pens, so we're going to try those out too now. The whatever you pull out of the bowls is just a jumping off point. You can add anything else you want to to this. It's supposed to get you inspired in creating and give you something to start with and kind of get your creative juices flowing and kind of help you get back in the rhythm of creating a more joyful place than from a place of being stuck in an art salon. I'm excited. I'm a little nervous, but I'm super excited. You can also use reference images, so if you, if you're doing architecture along with me and you wanted to look up some images on unsplash or in your own photography or anywhere else that you like to get your image sources from. That is totally great. I'm just going to go from my imagination and see what happens. Drawing from my imagination is something that I'm continually working on and trying to become better at. I'm just going to start mapping in some vertical lines. I'm going to see where we go from there. Let's keep it rough. Some values I do want to get to water color since that's an important part of this. The other fun thing about doing this is that it's a chance to play with colors that I don't normally mix up and probably wouldn't have created if I was just left in my own devices. I like that it's already getting me away from what I tend to gravitate towards. Right. I think I want to go back in some more of these brush pens and you can be done with this at any point in time. There's really truly no rules other than incorporate whatever you draw out of your cups or containers into the piece I like to scratch into the wet areas. Definitely would not have made this on my own, which is pretty cool because normally when we think of an art slum, we think of being stuck to come up with something that isn't your normal stuff is exciting, very exciting. Oh, I totally forgot I was using, let's see, I forgot to use the color pencils I get out. It's going to also reactivate some of the other stuff we have down. I like this a lot completely out of my comfort zone. Nothing I ever would have come up with just super cool pop in line detail a little bit. I love a great ser ball line. Awesome. I love this. Oh my gosh. I'm going to go ahead and write on here. What led to this? My fine liner. We had architecture which led me to create more geometric, alluding to buildings. We had neutral colors and water color. One done. Now you can do as many of these as you want to. I'm going to explore another one. So I'm just going to and flip this and not worry about the fact that it's probably still a little wet. You can put the pieces you drew back into the mix or you can leave them out so that you keep drawing more options. I'm going to go ahead and take those out and I'm going to go ahead and put away my neutral colored pencils. I can use neutrals. Again, I'm not limited, but I know that I'm not going to specifically draw neutrals a second time around. This is also a really nice thing to do as a warm up if you just need to get into the groove of creating before you get back to a project or start a project that you're excited about. All right, what do we have here? Line, love it, colored pencil, no color. Wow. All right then we're going to be, because if we got colored pencil, we know we're going to be using black. We've got line colored pencil, no color, black and white. Now, we could also use gray to, I suppose we could use gray. This one I'm going to do a couple of small ones. So what I'm going to do is draw in a thumbnail box. I'm going to draw in a couple of thumb boxes. It doesn't have to be a whole page. That's the other fun thing about this. It can be super small line, no color. All right? This is going to start breaking this up. All right? Line colored pencil, no color. Now let's go again. It doesn't have to be. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. There's another one line colored pencil, no color. Let's do one more. You know what? I'm really enjoying this. I want to do another one focusing on thumbnail size pictures. Let's see another subject circle. We have a theme, charcoal. This one, eyes close, circle charcoal, eyes close. This one is going to get really fun. I haven't used vine charcoal in a very long time. I'm going to go ahead and just break some of this off and work with that. You're just going to have to trust me that I'm going to close my eyes. But I promise you eyes will be closed. I'm going to focus on circular motions with charcoal. But now the fun thing about something like charcoal or soft Pt is that even unwrapped cons the pointy end, but you can also use it flat. Let's see. All right, I'm going to take a breath. Find my paper with one hand. I've got the charcoal in my other hand, and my eyes are closed. For just a little while, I'm going to start making some circular shapes on my paper, not worrying about if it goes over the other stuff I have going on there. I'm going to try doing it on the side, find charcoals, a little trickier to do This charcoal is pretty messy. That's okay. I feel like it's a good day if you've gotten some art on you fun. I really love that it's playful, it's got different values to it. There's some really nice line quality, some lovely texture, because I'm working on my watercolor paper, play around with this. And it's just meant to be fun and playful and to get you creating through very simple prompts and direction. Some of these could be great to work back into ideas, to explore further when you have more time or energy or whatever is going on. In our next lesson, we're going to continue working with randomness, but now we're going to be using it in terms of collage and a relaxing nature of repetition. Let's head over to the next lesson. See soon. 6. Exercise 3 Repetitive Collage: Now let's explore art making through some low stakes collage. This one's really fun for this exercise. We're going to be working with the idea of collage, but very basic shapes, so you can do a square or rectangle. The idea is to not do it perfect, just get the size that you want to start with. And then cut out a bunch of decorative papers or collage materials in that size. And then we're just going to randomly start gluing them down and it's going to be very meditative and very fun and relaxed. And we're just going to let go of everything and just have a really fun time. So I've already cut up some, but I want to make a few more. So I'm going to go ahead and grab one as a template. And then I'm just going to put it on top of some of my decorative paper. I love creating decorative paper with watercolor inks, acrylic, and it works great in an exercise like this. This is a wonderful use of scraps or just anything you've had lying around that makes you happy. So we're going to go ahead and just get a couple more of these cut before we dive into the next part. And it's totally fine. If they're imperfect, we're using our original shape as a rough template to create the rest of them. And you can create as many of these as you want. I like to have a lot of variety in my collage work, so I'm just going to cut out a couple from each paper that I'm using. You can also decide if you don't want to do squares or rectangles, you could do circles, you could do organic shapes. The idea is we're also going to play with repetition and pattern, so we want to make sure that they're all the same size shape, whatever shape you want to use. Doing a square rectangle means that I can quickly cut these out and not spend a ton of time on that portion of the exercise so that I can get to the collaging. But I do have a couple other fun papers that I've been laying around that I wanted to incorporate into this one. Normally, I would cut off the borders where I had taped it when I did the painting, but I'm going to leave those and let those be part of the clash. We really want to focus on the process for this one and maybe something cool will come out of it. Who knows? But I know that I'm going to have a lot of fun calmly gluing these down and I'm going to try to glue them with a glue stick. You might find that that is a little bit too mellow of a glue for the papers that you're using. It's hard to say. I might need to get out some of my liquid white glue and a paint, brush and paint on some of the glue. Also, that part will be a little bit of an experiment, but if you're working with pretty thin paper for your repetitive shapes or magazine images, you'll definitely be able to glue it down. No problem with just a glue stick. Now, I'm going to be working in a sketchbook that I made. This is an old cookbook. I gutted it. And then I used a bookmaking technique to sew back in signatures of pages. I love doing this to old books that I find at a thrift store. I'm just grabbing a nice page and I'm just going to start building this up. I am going to grab a scrap sheet of paper though, to glue on. Then I'm just going to randomly start grabbing them and putting on glue and sticking them down. You can decide if you want to go that way or this way. Feeling vertical. Today, everything is going to go in a vertical orientation and they're just going to go right next to each other. I can already see that things definitely got a little askew here. Oh, well, that's okay. I was going for an evenness. It's funny that the first one I pull out is much bigger than all the rest. That'll add to the fun of it. I do want them all to touch and I do want them all to line up, But I can work over and I can work down at the same time. I just don't want to have any white space between them. Another thing that helps when you're gluing thicker papers down, if you're doing it in a sketch book, you can close the page and give it a little squash and a little burnish to help the glue stick. Or you can put a piece of scrap paper over it too. If all you have on hand is a glue stick, I would definitely stick with thinner papers so that you don't have to battle getting those to stick down. Actually, I'm going to get out some liquid glue and go back and forth between the two. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a puddle of my liquid glue. Then for the thicker papers, I can just grab the paper, grab some glue painted on there, and then stick it down. If it gets really gluey, you might want to have a Df dry cloth on hand because then you can clean off your gluey fingers. I'm going to correct this a little bit and glue over that. And it'll give it a cool offset feeling too. When we're all done gluing it, we can close it up and put a heavy buck on top of it, and that'll help it stay down. Now the process is what's important, so we don't need to worry about the fact that it's not sticking very well. But I do want it stuck until the very end. I am going to keep battling it to get it to stick more. Some of these are so big, why are they so big? Who knows? The other thing you could do is you could play with the overlap shingle it. You would see on rough, rough shingling, you could have one here and then you could have and offset it down. That would be pretty fun. Remember, the goal is to keep creating through our art slump, but also to get some new inspiration. Try out some new ideas. Go to places that we don't normally go creatively or artistically. If you have an idea, as you're working through any of our exercises, follow it, Don't stop yourself. Or if you want to stay true to the exercise, you can always write it down and then circle back to it. Just make a note of it so that you don't forget it. It's always such a bummer when you forget a really great creative idea that you have. I'm just going to trim this so I can fill it up there. I really like this paper. All right? I'm just going to keep going. I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video and I will be back once I've glued down everything and filled the whole page. Hello. All right. So I have filled my whole sketchbook page with rectangles from various decorative papers that I have collected and created over time. There are different color schemes, things are kind of crazy. But I can tell you that I really enjoyed the calm process of just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and then glue paste, glue paste, glue, paste. I'm going to let this dry and then I might work back into it. I'm not sure who knows, but I know that it's a really fun page in my sketchbook and it's getting me one step closer to working through my art. Slum collaging can be so relaxing. I hope that you've enjoyed that. And then it just kind of became sort of a calming, meditative, easy to create artistic thing exercise as we continue working through our art slump. In our next lesson, we're going to explore the benefits of an art challenge or focusing on a single subject or a single artistic skill or technique to continue creating through our art slump. See you there. 7. Exercise 4 Challenges: Another way to approach an art slump is through an art challenge. Check out the list of art prompts and challenges over on the projects and resources section. This approach to creating through an art slump can really provide you an opportunity to do a deep dive in an area of creating that you've been wanting to improve. To get you continuing to create and maintaining a creative habit even when you're not feeling very creative or inspired. That may be doing a daily art prompt. And we're going to also work through a little one together. I want to take us through two different art prompts just to get us creating in a really super fast, quick way. The first one we're going to do is doors. You're just going to draw as many doors as you can think of. Super quick drawings. Don't really worry about how they look, just get whatever ideas for a door pop into your head out on the paper quickly using any drawing material that you like. You could even paint this if you wanted to, but drawing would be the fastest. I'm just playing with different shapes. Playing with the idea of doors having windows, doors having door knobs, the framework around the door, Different shapes. Like I said, just having some fun creating some different ideas without any plan for this to go any farther, other than to get me drawing in a fun way with a idea that is super approachable and easy to draw depending on how complicated you want to get with your Or designs. I'm just doing this with the Posca paint marker, but like I said, any media would work, just drawing whatever ideas come to mind quickly on the page. Playing with the space around the doors to give different feelings to the doors. Now let's do another one. This one I'm going to do hats. There's tons of different hats in the world. Tons of different hats for different jobs, different times in history. This is another really fun one where you just start playing with design and shape and line to create different feelings and different types of pants. Another super easy prompt you can do. There's tons you can find on line. But these were just two that came to mind. And I said, okay, I want to do an art prompt. I just want to do something quick. I don't want to commit a lot of time to this, but I want to get myself drawing so I can stay fluid and creative and consistent in my art making habit. In a low stakes way, I love doing art prompts. It's just such a fun way to get me regularly creating. I love participating in October. In October, I've done self December in December. So you can have a lot of fun with this and just keep yourself creating on a daily basis. Another thing that I really like to do is I like to turn to others when I'm in a creative slump or an art slump, and use their guidance in place of my own. These are just some of the books that I have in my art studio that I love to turn to when I'm especially feeling uninspired or just lost artistically. Some of them are practice oriented, like Omar wins. Go with the flow painting. Omar's book takes you through different processes and exercises as you work on very specific subjects with watercolor, with a loose application, which is great. This is a really fabulous book by Carla Sondheim. It's a mixed media workshop based book for drawing and painting imaginary animals. I really love intuitive art making. Dean Nimmer has a wonderful book called Art from Intuition. I love it because it's got some really fabulous exercises for drawing and painting that just kind of helped shake up my creative practice and get me thinking about art and art making in a new way. The Sketchbook Challenge by Sue Blye has wonderful techniques and prompts for achieving different creative goals with the focus of a sketch book in mind. And the nice thing about sketchbook is that it tends to be pretty private. It's a little bit more low stakes because we're not working on an artwork, we're just working into our sketch book. Which is kind of a safe place for us to create and grow and explore and experiment without the worry that it's going to be something big like creating an artwork which can sometimes seem overwhelming. This book is really fabulous. This is abstract painting with Vicky Perry. It is some really great techniques to kind of get into abstract artwork through painting as a lens. The great thing about books like Vicki's are that because it's abstract, what we come out with isn't trying to make something look like something else. So abstract is a very safe place to play when you're not sure what to do or you're feeling a little lost or you're kind of stuck. And then there's other great books like Jay Rotors. This is 100 Days of Lettering Challenges like this. This one is a complete guide to different ways to letter so you can grow in your lettering abilities. You can follow his guidance as you work through each of the prompts and exercises and techniques. And then you're also gaining a skill that you can continue to apply to your parade of practice, which is really what all of these are about. But turning to the guidance of others, whether it be through a book that you can get from the library or one that you have in your collection that classes online, This is another way to approach art making through the art slump and giving you a little bit more guidance and direction. Than just sitting at your art table staring at your supplies, going, what do I do? I'll include a huge list of these and more on the projects and resources section of class. To for this one, I found a really fun project using Esso and collage paper in acrylic paint. I decided that I would create this in my sketch book. The first step you do is you just put Esso down on the paper and you move it around to create different textures. You're supposed to let it dry, but I just really wanted to keep creating and didn't want to wait for that Drs. I decided to use the Esso as an adhesion so that it would hold down my collage paper. I'm following the idea of the floral in the book that I'm using, but I wanted just keep playing and let it evolve. The project in the book is a very loose guide just to give me some basis to go off of the Justo is my adhesion to put down my collage materials. I'm not worrying about the fact that it's going over some of my magazine pages because I don't mind if they get lost in the process of this. They're just like a sketch almost to give me some shapes to work with for when I attach the acrylic paint, building up some basic flower shapes, and then I'm adding some more gesso. And here's where I got a little crazy. I didn't really fully intend for it to cover up the magazine images as much as it did, but I wanted them to stick down really well, and I decided I would just roll with it. Then I had the idea that if I put down some magazine paper and burnished over the top, I could pull up some of the gesso and create some additional texture on top of the page. This one, I did let it dry after that, before I went in with the acrylic paint. Then actually I'm just using some leftover acrylic paint that was still wet on my palette from a previous painting that I had done. I'm using that plus then I added in some red green and orange for the flower sections. I'm just building up a rough sky with the acrylic going in and roughing in the stems with the green. And just continually going back in and refining the shapes that I'm creating. But also playing with continually adding texture with the breast strokes and the application of the acrylic paint and letting the colors do a lot of mixing on the page. It's super rough, super expressionistic. Just going for a fun mixed media art experience in my sketchbook without any concerns for how it turns out, other than letting each step push the next one as I continually build it up. Now if you did something like this, you could let it dry and then go back into it with paint pens or markers. I might go back and do that another time, but for this art session, I only had enough time to get through the acrylic process. And that was great because I wanted to have a fun art making session doing something that is out of my norm. I don't normally do a lot of florals. I haven't been getting out my acrylics very much. So this was a fun way to get into some different media that I love and enjoy, but don't naturally turn to. Flowers are fun and pretty and colorful. So it just gave me something interesting to play with. And then I am playing a little bit with value in the background because I really do want to continually define the sections of the flowers so that they stand out. But I love how this turned out. This was a really fun session in the art studio, Coming to my table in a way that I don't normally show up and really playing and growing as an artist by doing something that isn't my usual. So I'm really excited about this one. It's definitely an art process and I am going to revisit in the future. For this one, I really wanted to play with some of the exercises in Carla Sondheim's book, and this one is called, it's based on scribbles. So you grab a pen and you just make random scribbles, and then you're looking for images in those scribbles. And you can add more marks to it. You can add different media to it. You can do whatever you want to it. I made three wacky scribbles my sketchbook, and then I started turning the page to figure out what images I saw in there. This funny character came out of this one, ended up turning my sketchbook upside down, and all of a sudden there was a nose that led to this. And then adding in some fun hair details, keeping it really stylized and cartoony, and just having a lot of fun building out this character, using the scribbles as the foundation. Then I wanted to keep going. This one, I saw a poodle. I don't know, There was something about it. There were feet, there was a little buffont hair to it. I had a lot of fun adding in some details, adding in the back legs, the further back legs, and then some ears and eyes, and nose and stuff to make that into a doodle. And then this other one, I wasn't really sure where to go with it, but it felt like a figure of some sort. It had a whimsy to it because it didn't really have normal shapes to, it became a clown in the end, a very loose whimsical figurative clown. Some funny punching bag fists. I don't know. I added a cute little hat to him in a little face and started putting in a collar and buttons and just defining his jumpsuit. Then I wanted to keep the next step of this super loose and fun. I just decided to grab a couple of colored pencils. Play with texture, play with a loose application. Just put some pops of color in there to help further define my scribble creatures. I played around with some different blues in my poodle, keeping the fluffy hair quality as best I could. Playing around with a little bit of light colored pencil application versus boulder, but really just having fun working back into my scribble creatures and bringing them more to life. This is a great exercise. I've done this before with my own kiddos. I've done this with my students, different stages of teaching. Just a nice, easy way to create in a very low stakes manner and have some fun. It brings you back to when you were a child and you look up at the sky and you try to see images in the clouds. It's the same idea, we're seeing images in our scribbles or our doodles. And how fun is that with the figure? I'm just adding in some more color and just having a lot of fun putting in defining it further through color so that it has a little bit even more life and vibrancy to it. So I just proceeded to do that with all the rest of my scribble creatures. And then sometimes to get out of an art slump, you need to take it back to the basics and just work on some very technical minded art where it's very much exercises. It's very much about learning a certain technique or a skill, or a way to apply a media or to try a new media or one that you're maybe a little. I've had this book that on Marwin created for quite some time and I have not had the chance to go back into it. My art slump provided the perfect time for me to get out my watercolors, flip open to a page and just start working through some exercises that she put together. This book takes you through many of the different subjects that you might have seen her do. She goes in so much detail about the technicality of the water color. The great thing is I can go back to the book for this, but I can also just do the exercises and the pages and the small little paintings as quick little art sessions to further loosen up, open up, get more creative and have some fun making art. Now that we've explored some ways to work through an art slump and come to understand the need for continuing to create, let's turn over into our final lesson to wrap up the class. See you there. 8. Final Thoughts: You're now prepared to tackle an art slump head on and to continue to create despite those negative feelings discouraging you from picking up a pen or a paint prush. Thank you so much for taking this class and learning importance of not letting an art slump stop you from sitting down at your art table and continuing your creative practice. I hope that whenever an art slump hits you, or you just need some creative inspiration, or you want to do a fun exercise that you return to the activities that we have discovered in this class as a fun way to be playful and experimental. Challenge yourself, and most importantly, to ensure that you keep creating through those art slumps whenever they may hit. I'd love to see your art slump creations. If you feel comfortable sharing, please hand it over to the projects and resources section of class and post it to the student gallery. The wonderful thing about the student gallery in classes like this is that we're all coming at this from a similar situation. We're all experiencing a negative impact on our creative journey and we're working through it together. I'm here to support you. I'm in this too, and I hate being in an art slump. More than anything, I hate being in an art slump alone. So having a community of creatives who are also experiencing something similar or just need some extra art inspiration or whatever it may be. Having the student gallery is a really nice place because we can get inspired by each other. Either sharing the stories of what we're experiencing in our art slumps and how we're feeling as we work through them. Sharing what we create as we work through the different exercises. It's just that's a really wonderful community we have here. Be sure to check out the posts from other classmates and comment and connect, because connection is one of the most important things that can come out of one's creative journey. And getting to take classes online and meet people from all over the world who are also growing as creatives and working through it day by day. One pencil pen line at a time. You can also update your student project at any point in time. So feel free to continue to add to your post, to put up new images as you continually return through these exercises time. And again, if you update the cover image for your student project, it will give me a new notification. So I'll know that you've been in there and you've been sharing some more work so we can continue to connect as creatives and fellow art sloppers are greatly appreciated. If you left a review, student feedback is so important to me. I'm a very reflective teacher and a reflective artist. And hearing how students experience the class and what they found helpful, things that could be improved ideas. They have to expand on a class topic, whatever it may be. It's all so appreciated and so helpful. And I know that as a student, I love the feature of offering reviews because it gives me a chance to reflect back on my experience in a class and share any insights that I might have for others who are considering checking out the class in the future. If you happen to share your artwork on Instagram, I would love it if you take me so that I can check it out. And you can also continue to explore art and art making and artistic journeys with me. Over on Youtube, My channel is Elizabeth Welfare, and I post regularly different demonstrations and techniques and share whatever is happening in the land of art. If you check it out, be sure to click Subscribe so we can continue connecting beyond Skillshare. And if you want to stay up to date on my new of Skillshare classes, be sure to click the Follow button below. And I'll see you next time.