With today’s abundant use of social media, google, and the internet in general, it is so easy to find and search for ideas to inspire your next piece. What I find to be troubling is that it is so easy to click a button and find thousands of ideas, artists, paintings and more just by typing something into google.

I feel that many artists struggle with creating interesting and original content due to being overwhelmed and drowned by Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook and often get trapped into making artwork that is popular or trendy at the time.

I myself am a very advent user of all social medias and find them to be a wonderful platform to expose and promote your own work for others to see. But, I have also fallen down an endless Pinterest hole too many times to count.

What I have learned is that it is okay to look at others work and to feel inspired to make a piece in response to another artists’ work. What hurts you as an artist is to recreate the piece that another person has made and share it as your own work.

Not only does this hurt the other artist, but it also hurts you! You are not allowing yourself to think on your own and you are weakening your creativity skills which is what leads artists to feel stumped when it comes to brainstorming ideas.

What I have found to be the most engaging for myself, is to create my own lists in my sketchbooks of things that interest me such as furry animals, insects and hiking. And then from there, I try to break down different parts of those topics into things that could challenge me into creating an interesting subject.

For example:

Hiking could be broken down into the photos I take while hiking, hiking boots, body movements that mimic walking or climbing, etc.

I would then use these ideas to inspire my own piece. And it is also engaging my mind in brainstorming ideas that I came up with on my own.