Yeah, I am fairly familiar with a complete disability of being productive. It happens that after a regular 9-to-5 job or even a day of simple house tasks, one might lack the will of reading or clean dishes. Not to mention create additional personal projects. Eventually, the project you wanted to enrich your portfolio with, grows a longer beard than Rapunzel’s hair, and you don’t even recognize it anymore. That happened to me. For two years in a row. You might consider me quite an expert in the field of procrastination.

Ok, let’s not be overdramatic. Of course, it’s not obligatory to crunch all your life. If you don’t feel like focusing on such projects, that’s great. But if you envy other artists’ consistency in splitting out new fresh creations every week, while you barely can only gather references before getting bored, there’s one trick among others that might help you to overcome this streak.

Pick up a topic that you’ll actually enjoy producing. Not so revolutionary as you would have thought? It’s a quick tip, remember? This might seem simple, but let it sink in. Imagine, that you want to learn anatomy. How many statues of one muscle fiber can you sculpt before you’ll decide it’s not for you? For me, it’s a half. Instead, try to utilize your freshly assimilated skills on a character from your favorite show, cartoon, or whatever.

Are you a fan of Star Wars? There are still not enough Baby Yoda arts on the Internet. Or models of a Falcon Millennium if you are studying hard-surface. Before you jump into completely original work, first learn to imitate what already exists. Study your references and get familiar with the language of shapes. This way you’ll also expose yourself to good design practices.

For the next step, mixing different lores might be a cool idea. How would you imagine Garfield as The Godfather, or Alf as The Emperor (it’s a millennials’ thing, go google that up), you get what I mean?

I tried this method, and it worked to some extent. Kind of, because instead of producing regularly new artworks, I got stuck with months long projects I want to squeeze the most of as always (next habit I’d probably gotta get rid of). As a examble, there’s a character I’m working on right now. Hange Zoe from the anime Attack On Titan.

This trick might help you to stay focused on a project a little longer. If this problem doesn’t occur to you, maybe you could share with others what’s your secret. Do you have anything like that, or do you get the impression that it’s your mindset in general? I’d like to hear if other artists experience similar struggles.