How To Not Be Stuck

Artists sometimes try to create inside their mind, and can get stuck in there.

Artists are dreamers, and that’s a good thing. Thinking about our own work is fun and necessary. We imagine new ideas and directions. Dreaming is how we know which direction to take next, because it’s how we find a new destination.

When you’re an artist, and you begin to dream about your work, I encourage you to get to a pencil and some paper as soon as you can (or the digital equivalent). Dreaming without drawing is like traveling without moving. Deciding where to go is important, and the very first thing to do. In order to get there, though, you have to get moving.

Active thinking is different than dreaming. Making an outline for plans, drawing ideas, writing down a list of steps to take, are all actions that are done with a pencil moving on paper. This kind of thinking is the movement towards your destination.

The first art book I ever looked at was called, “Thinking with a pencil”, by Henning Nelms, which my mother had. She let me use when I was in grade school. I didn’t read much of the words, but the diagrams and captions were captivating, and I copied a lot of the drawings in it. Mom told me the basic idea, that thinking without a pencil was difficult. The writer believed that everyone who could control their hand and movement enough to write their own name, could learn to make good drawings if they wanted to. He also felt that moving a pencil on the paper propels your thoughts forward (or at least I got that idea from looking at the book). That has been a good concept and has helped me all my life.

Lists

I am a big proponent of list-making.

Multi-tasking is an unfortunate word. Humans can only effectively do two things at once, and at least one of them has to be an automatic thing, such as driving or chewing gum. We can talk while driving, but doing more than that is exponentially difficult. Imagine doing these 3 simple things all at the same time: driving, telling someone about a museum you went to, and choosing the plants you need to buy for your new garden.

Breaking things down into lists and steps is an essential tool for humans. We often feel like we know all the things we need to do, but our brains can’t land on them. Switching between several things one after another, we can’t figure out why we’re not actually doing any of them. Procrastination is often just a product of not knowing the next step to take.

Usually it’s because we can’t identify the one thing that is most important. When there are more than 2 things in our minds, we feel like a cloud of them is floating around our head. We see one for a moment and think, yeah, I need to do that. But before we start, another urgent item floats into view and grabs our attention. All these items are actually competing for our attention, and we need to find the winner. We need to know which one is in first place so we can devote our time to only that one, ignoring the rest until it’s done.

It’s surprisingly easy to find the winner after you’ve written all the competing tasks down. Usually there are fewer of them than we thought too, becoming maybe 5 items when we thought it was more like a dozen. Seeing them written down, it becomes clear which order they need to be arranged in.

We love the idea of dreaming as a way to continue our plans, or that thinking is all you need to get started. But no. You can dream, but you can’t do very much actual visual work in your mind. Trust me on this one; you can create ideas solely within the mind, but it’s nearly impossible to think your way into moving forward on those ideas.

You need a pencil. It needs to be moving.

So be careful not to fall into this trap of using only your mind to plan your art. Artists need to dream, and ideas are important, but thoughts without a pencil, will not work very well to get you moving. You can get stuck with the heady ideas, and that actually prevents starting on them. It keeps you occupied in your mind instead of on the paper or canvas. You actually think better when your pencil is moving, writing and/or drawing on some paper.

Make lists. Make thumbnail sketches and diagrams. Make detailed drawings.

Dream big, but have your tools - that good old pencil and paper - ready to take action on those dreams.