Finding Inspiration : At Your Fingertips
The story of endless inspiration must begin with what is at your fingertips…a willingness and excitement to understand the nature of art materials or media and tools: their characteristics, properties, how they behave independently and how they play with others. Understanding this fundamental groundwork is an artist’s heartbeat: empowering your choices, your focus, your versatility and your voice as a storyteller.
Simply normalizing playtime with your art materials allows for a pleasurable and valuable learning experience, which is greatly inspiring.
Fledgling artists are able to make important connections while uncovering a playground filled with a variety of colours, textures and consistencies.
Skilled artists will benefit from the space, clarity and joy of not having to chase a finished work or masterpiece.
Paint or any other art media can only serve its intended purpose if it’s being used to either increase your knowledge and confidence in how to express your work or in the actual process of creating. In other words, this experimentation is preparation for every artist to reach new horizons.
Artists have a duty to embrace experimentation and not be overly concerned with using or saving every last drop of paint…a common fallacy or modern distraction…’Paint is only wasted when it stays in the tube’ is a sentiment to have in your back pocket.
When you get better at practicing art then you will also make adjustments on how better to keep, clean, conserve, utilize and distribute your mediums and various tools as well… it’s all part of the bigger picture process.
It’s also important that you should create with whatever you have available to you and not be held back by thinking in terms of lack.
I do whole heartedly suggest tip-toeing into this vast playground of art supplies…with a goal list and to remain focused on one project at a time.
When choosing art materials, I use one main criteria to evaluate their usefulness:
Simply Asking…
are you going to take me where I’m going?
My tools have to move with me….I have an idea of where I want to go with my next project…the only thing I need to question is whether this kind of paint, medium, substrate etc is going to support me to express my work and to reach my end goal.
Understanding my tools better is greatly inspiring… a catalyst to show up and create something.
Naturally, they will compliment the themes, subjects, objects and other endlessly inspiring connections you need to explore to create more and then another mystery is revealed…creating your own work is an even bigger inspiration!
An artist’s own work will inspire them to create the next one and so on….so, make your process as fun as possible.
