How to Overcome Challenges and Get Your Art Back on Track

As an artist, you’re bound to come across some challenges and it can’t always be easy to know how to firstly recognise those challenges and secondly know how to overcome them. Maintaining motivation and pushing through the challenging stages of a drawing can be difficult! This is why I’m sharing some of the challenges I have come across and offering some tools to help you overcome them.

Sometimes you just get to a point in a drawing where you find yourself losing interest or start feeling frustrated when things don’t go as planned and it’s not uncommon for some artists to give up on their artwork for weeks at a time because they’ve fallen out of love with it, and getting back into it can feel a bit daunting, especially if you’re not feeling particularly inspired.

When I became a full-time artist I found that it didn’t necessarily become easier but you also find that you don't really have a choice. You just have to power through! If your art is just a hobby and you’re just drawing for the love of it, it can be much more difficult when you start to lose faith and inspiration not to just stop.

Drawing and being creative is an amazing form of mindfulness and forgetting about any troubles but it can also bring its own challenges when it comes to working on your mindset. It can get really frustrating sometimes, we’ve all been there, and it’s just about finding a way to carry on with the total joy of drawing!

One of the ways I have been able to move past some of the frustration is by acknowledging that coloured pencils are a really slow medium. You basically need to come to terms with the fact that your drawing is going to go through ‘ugly’ stages and they’re not going to be forever but they’re kind of inevitable. So just keep going, trust the process, and you’ll make it out the other side.

The other thing to remember, particularly if you’re a more experienced artist, is that you know you’re good, you know you create beautiful pieces of artwork, and you can be confident in your abilities. This stage that you’re finding challenging is just another step in your development. A way to improve and maybe learn a new skill or technique. It can sometimes be a bit disheartening and you may suddenly feel like you’ve forgotten how to draw and have lost confidence in your abilities, but try to remember, it’s just a learning curve and actually something positive because now you can add a new tool to your toolbox.

Change is hard. It is and it’s no different when you’re drawing. If you’re drawing an animal with long fur for the first time, you’re trying out a new surface, or you’re experimenting with a background, these are all new things that are going to require you to use different techniques. They may require some trial and error and a bit of a creative mind to figure out a different way of doing things, so constantly reminding yourself of that fact will be really helpful in not feeling frustrated and like you have to give in.

Most artists will experience challenges, no matter their ability or experience level, but knowing how to overcome these challenges will help you to get back to the pure joy of drawing and stop you from feeling frustrated with your work! You can hear more by watching the video at the top of this page. Happy drawing!