Staying in the Color

Inspiration is a giant part of any creative's journey. It is essential to keep you going and provide you with ideas that keep your creations fresh! This is a topic I have touched on in the past with "Inspiring Color." In that post, I spoke about where I go to for inspiration in terms of artists that I admire. While these people are able to reinvigorate my inspiration for design, it is a whole other feat try and stay constantly inspired. Being able to maintain inspiration is a difficult task, but over my time so far as a designer, I have found some activities and ideas that help me stay inspired.

The first of these activities involves watching tutorials. This is because whether you're a child in kindergarten or an experienced professional, you should always try to keep learning. Tutorials are a fantastic source of learning not only new concepts but also other people's viewpoints. For example, one day I was watching a Photoshop tutorial about how to better use the pen tool. Before watching, I thought I was almost a pro with the tool and had nothing to really improve. However, not even 10 seconds in I began learning about many different features the pen tool actually has. In fact, my workflow became so much quicker thanks to all the shortcuts I learned. Aside from my new found pen tool moves, I also paid attention to the artwork that the presenter was working on which made the wheels in my head start turning about new possible art pieces to make. The big thing I want to drive home about watching tutorials is that you never know what you might learn from them. Including the example above, I have had countless other occurrences with finding inspiration in tutorials.

The second activity that I use to stay inspired is what I like to call a "Through it all up there" run. What I mean by this is that every once and a while I just start blending and placing assets together to find any cool new ideas. This activity is actually very helpful sometimes because you never know when a cool idea will appear in front of you! The phone cases currently available in my Society6 shop were actually created through this activity. Sometimes giving yourself no rules or restrictions to follow really allows you to workout that creative side of the brain.

The third activity I want to share with you today about staying inspired is listening to as much music as possible. Music is a very wonderful thing and I could not live without it. Sometimes when I'm designing and feel myself running out of ideas, I always either put on my go-to playlist or just pick a random song and go with it. You not only find some cool new songs, but you also get your head in a different space. I know this sounds crazy, but I honestly believe different genres of music evoke different ideas and feelings from me. For example, while I was making my latest art post, "Expand Your Mind," I was listening to some deep, trap, electronic music. When I was creating "Liquified Vitamin C" I was jamming out to some indie-pop (Check out my last two posts for my top 10 favorites songs from this genre!). For some reason, the different tempos and sounds put me in a unique head-space that lets my creativity thrive!

Overall, there are so many ways to maintain inspiration throughout your day or the week. These three that I mentioned are my favorite ways to do so. I hope that if you are ever struggling to stay inspired, you will try one of them! Until tomorrow's post.

- Jared