#shihpost

Genuinely…? Fuck around and find out.

The source of art block can be many things, including real life stressors, a growing awareness that you haven’t done anything ‘new’ in [period of time], and the feeling like you’ve hit the end of the road with a fandom you’ve referred to as your identity for [possibly different period of time]. It is my firm belief that sometimes, you have to pick up something new for the sake of it being NEW.

This is not advocating for you to jump fandom to fandom like streaming services jump IPs and copyrighted shows. That will probably exacerbate the block, and give you a headache on top.

But from where does one start fucking around? How do you fuck around without wasting time?

That’s why the ‘find out’ is included with the advice. You’re not gonna know whether something was worth the time until you reach the end (of your patience, of the activity, take your pick).

I dunno. I think there’s a valid point for letting the art block go away naturally as it’s usually an indicator that you’re on the edge/in the midst of burn-out, and not trying to brute-force your way through it, but if you’re like me, you wanna get the block done with NOW. And my best method for that is fucking around (to find out). 

An example where this worked: the Little Lion Man animatic, when I usually never make art for Dimension 20, which eventually blossomed into 100+ panels because I couldn’t help myself from trying to capitalize on the musical beats

An example where this hasn’t worked: I checked out something like ‘100 Animals to Draw’ on Libby in the hopes that it’d help with BNHA Redwall AU. This did not pan out the way I wanted it to, and now I have awful permanent doodles of misshapen animals in my journal.