Feeling Uninspired? Make The Projects You’d Never Dare To Make

[Note: This is an edited/ self-censored version of this article. The explicit/NSFW full version can be found at PekoeBlaze Uncut]

Well, a couple of weeks ago (at the time of writing this article), I wasn’t feeling very artistic. This had been going on for a while and, whatever I did to try to solve this problem didn’t really work.

Yes, I could just about make about one drawing a day if I really tried, but the inspiration was fairly weak and the enthusiasm was barely even there. Making a drawing felt like a dreary and detached exercise.

To use a tired metaphor, squeezing a drawing out of my imagination was like squeezing blood out of a stone. At the time that this article is posted, I hope that this still isn’t the case. Anyway, I was starting to think that this prolonged slump in my artistic enthusiasm was a sign that I should move on to making a comic. But even that idea didn’t really fill me with enthusiasm either – the idea of making a long daily comic just seemed like exhaustingly hard and joyless work to me.

Needless to say, I was feeling kind of miserable and I didn’t even have a solution to my problem which I could use as the basis for another vaguely angst-ridden article like this one. So, I made my one drawing for the day and then just ended up surfing the internet aimlessly, filled with dreary ennui – my soul feeling as heavy, dreary and sluggish as a …Well, I couldn’t even think of good metaphors.

It was a while later that I realised that I had more ideas than I thought that I had. Or rather, I had a few really interesting creative ideas which filled me with energy, enthusiasm and passion – but they were for the kinds of projects which I would never dare to make. Or at least the kinds of projects that I’d never dare to publish or possibly even create. Everything from grotesque horror stories to stories of a fairly risque nature.

In other words, when it comes to my imagination, Eros and Thanatos seem to be the most powerful parts of it. They’re the parts of my imagination where all of my best ideas seem to come from.

Anyway, the idea that stuck in my mind was an idea for the beginning of a fairly *ahem* risque comic book.

Well, the idea stuck in my mind even though the idea of devoting a lot of time and effort into a comics project which I probably wouldn’t even think about showing to anyone else, let alone publish on here. So, with no other ideas, I decided to sketch one of the less explicit parts of it just for the sake of it.

Fairly soon after I started drawing it, I realised something. I felt like an artist again. I felt all of the enthusiasm, creativity and passion which I thought that I had lost. I remembered how magical creating art should feel like. Rather than sitting back and just drawing something, I was completely immersed in the act of creating art. There’s a big difference between these two things and I’d almost forgotten what the latter felt like.

I don’t know if I’ll ever actually make this comic and I probably won’t. Even if I do, I’ll almost certainly never publish it. But, by even making a symbolic gesture of creating something that I’d never dare to create, I found my creativity and artistic passion again.

So, if you’re feeling uninspired, then it might be worth taking the first tentative steps towards making that project which has always fascinated you, but which you’ve never quite had the courage to even think about making. No, you don’t have to publish it, but it might help you to remember what it feels like to be inspired.

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Anyway, I hope that this article was useful 🙂