Brace yourself for word vomit! This started as an inbox question and turned into an essay that I think is useful in general(I asked if this was okay first).
I find it helps to exercise with drawing and also treat it like play time. Give yourself set time to only make art, and remove distractions. No computer, phone, etc. I think it's better to draw finished stuff without music, but music is fine for this! Think of it as workout music! but pencil and paper is really the key here. No digital. Get away from the serotonin rectangles. Just sit down and aimlessly doodle.
Now I say pencil, but I find something permanent like pen is better. Just make it something you can't erase. When you work with pencil that gives you too much choice and holds you back. You make a stroke, don't even know why you made that stroke, erase it, rinse, repeat, pull out your phone, doomscroll, and now you just have a dirty piece of blank paper. You perceive your sketching as a mistake, and your instinct is to revert to the blank canvas. You don't want that! With a basic bic ballpoint pen, that line is there forever. You get the rare human bliss of giving up control and submitting to the whims of the universe.
That line was a "mistake" and now you get to doodle it into being something. I think tree limbs are great for this because you can always just keep adding to them without thinking. It gets longer here, the bark cracks and swirls there, sap bleeds from it, bugs, and birds, and squirrels inhabit it, someone carved their name here, broke a branch there. My hands drew a turtle, but my mind realized that turtles can't climb trees, so I sent it back to my hands for revisions and got a weird bearded squirrel with a little guy riding him. I didn't know I'd get this. It just happened.
(I say pen, but I used a lead holder without and eraser. Use whatever you want, but not erasing is the important part!)
Let your mind rest, and let your brain and your arms do the thinking for you and just see where they take you. See if you can find a rhythm to it and maybe it'll become like dancing. It can turn into something resembling meditation. Don't concern yourself with something finished. Don't make sandcastles. Be a child playing in the mud. You can put a leaf in a mud pie, but really you should just be happy that you're having fun and getting filthy. Creating is the fun and the result is just a bonus.
Beyond that if you want something more structured, I find that adults kind of forget the things that make art fun and exciting. That sense of "whoa! I made that!". With social media we get other people to say "whoa! you made that!" but it's more like "yup. you sure did make that. that's pretty good I guess. have a notification" and where's the magic in that? This kind of feeling is harder to achieve when you get better at art. Figuring out how to draw biceps feels really cool. Perfecting drawing biceps feels like you're going through the motions. It's cardio. Everyone knows cardio is good for you, but nobody likes cardio.
You know why people don't shut up about crossfit though? Because crossfit is fun, varied, you can mix things up, flip tires, climb things, jump around, and use your body like you have a body to use instead of sitting a bike for 30 minutes watching a clock.
So the more structured approach is to break out of your comfort zone! This could be any number of things. Maybe you're bad at drawing mechs. Draw some robots! Draw lots of robots! My favorite thing to do with this is use this as an opportunity to develop your own style. Taking this back again, this is what we used to do when we were kids.
We all have artists we like and think "oh my god I wish I could draw like that" and you can draw like that! Find an artist you feel that strongly about, and copy their work. Break it down, figure out what they did to make it do that. Do that again and again and again and again and again and again.Now draw your own stuff and apply what you learned. You're going to look at that thing you just made and go "oh my god. that looks awesome".
and the beautiful and terrifying thing about this is there's no end to this particular rabbit hole. It goes as deep as you want it to. The more artists you do this with, the less your art will look like an obvious copy of, say, Akira Toriyama, and the more your art will become what you want it to be. It's an exciting process!
and all of this said you might not want to produce any "finished" art still. My last piece of advice is accept that as A-okay! This is fun. Pure and distilled and profound. A moment of play and entertainment that exists for this moment just for you. You lose that when you worry about finishing art to post online. When you want or need to make art for that purpose, you'll get around to that. For now just relearn enjoying the process.
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