So there you are, head brimming with color palettes and things you want to paint and illustrate, while sleep seems to be a distant memory. It’s midnight. Why didn’t these great ideas come when you were putting together a mood board and color stories that afternoon?
Does that ever happen to you, when you’re just trying to wind down for the night to catch some Z’s but the mind seems to be thinking of every possible thing you want to pursue in your creative journey? Funny how sometimes when we are stuck in a creative rut, no ideas seem to stick and simply performing a creative task becomes a chore.
Now on a normal day I’d suggest if your wild artist imagination remains active in the wee hours of the morning, to keep a bedside journal in which you can jot down these precious, but fleeting, ideas. I figured since this was my reality every single night, I wanted to make a non-exhaustive list of subjects I could paint and illustrate to never again be faced with the silly question of ‘my brain can’t fathom a single interesting thing to paint’ when I was left staring at a blank piece of watercolor paper every afternoon. It is my hope that the ideas presented in this post will serve as inspiration to you if you are:
An artist currently stuck in a horrible creative block vortex (which seems to be never-ending).
Someone who dabbles in creative exploration with painting, sketching, and other forms of creative outlets but is always looking for additional inspiration.
An illustrator or artist looking to refresh your creative practice by tackling a subject matter that you’ve never painted before.
One of the first animal subjects I painted in recent years, back in early 2019, was a combination of me telling myself “Nikita, you got this, you love leopards, why not paint ‘em? How hard can it be?” to “What have I gotten myself into, this looks awful, abort mission” to “Ok this is not half bad… I didn’t know that painting leopard spots could be so therapeutic”. Trust your inner cheerleader and silence your inner critic. You got this!
Animals
Primates: Apes, lemurs, baboons, orangutans, chimpanzees, etc. Consider the interest you can create in paintings with textures for fur, colorful shading, and playful postures.
Birds: Toucans, Macaws, Flamingoes, Sparrows, Eagles, Owls, etc. Birds provide great movement that can be translated into very interesting illustrations in terms of stationary vs. in-flight movements. Feathers add a whole different dimension of interest!
Reptiles & Amphibians: Crocodiles, snakes, frogs, etc. If you’re like me and are dead scared of snakes, paint ‘em. If the Google search for a reference image to find the perfect Green Mamba to paint doesn’t deter you, consider that a win. And then proceed to paint the wonder that is “scales, scales, and and more scales”.
Land creatures vs. sea creatures vs. sky creatures: Change up your creative practice by trying your hand at animals of various habitats. This not only helps in understanding body proportions but also helps you explore fun textures in the process. You could take this one step further and also paint the environment the species inhabits!
Plant Life
Flowers: Tropical vs. Sub-Tropical vs. Indoor plants, etc. Consider selecting a region of the world which have piqued your curiosity, and research about botanical plant life in that particular country. Consider color gradients, shapes, size, density of each plant.
Trees & Leaves: Leaves in different terrains offer an unlimited amount of inspiration to capture their essence in multiple ways - how about sketching an extremely detailed version of a maple leaf? Or perhaps a sea of lily pads floating in a pond (at a macro scale).
Flora offers an abundance of opportunities to refresh your creativity. Think outside the box, and instead of painting only flowers, find 5-10 plants that have markedly unique shapes to tackle the sketching process.
Landscapes:
Think of the 4 seasons and the existence of those seasons (or lack thereof) in different regions of the world. Winter, summer, spring, fall through the lens of local geographies (i.e. yes the Grand Canyon is located in the sunny and warm state of Arizona but did you know how gorgeous it looks during the winter season with its million-year-old-sunset-tinted-layers covered in powdery snow? (Google it)
Try using drastically different color palettes for landscapes. You will find that muted, realistic palettes will provide an interesting contrast to unconventional or monochrome color choices.
People:
Figure studies: Excluding nudes, this is a great way to understand body proportion, movement, light/shadows and
Portraiture: If painting/sketching faces strikes your fancy, this is a great tool to learn about how the simplest of lines can add years to a face and change the emotion expressed by the person being illustrated. Note that by no means does portraiture need to be realistic! It can be as simple and modern or as detailed and traditional as you need it to be.
While this subject is always an intimidating one, it truly provides so much room to explore body shapes, colors, positions, and movement
Still life:
Natural objects: Food, rocks, shells, flowers, plants
Man-made objects: Vases, drinking glasses, crockery and other utensils & tools, books, jewellery, coins, etc.
This is a great way to start familiarizing yourself with how you use your tool of choice! You simply cannot go wrong painting/sketching a simple teapot. Take all the time in the world, that teapot’s not runnin’ away anywhere. Bonus, you get to enjoy a warm cup of tea as you sketch/paint, and thats a win in my book.
Abstracts:
Shapes: Playing with basic shapes (circles, squares, lines) to study how they relate to each other is often a great way to get your feet wet in not only getting to know your art tools better, but in sparking ideas which never would have occurred to you before. Who knows, maybe you will find a new color combo you absolutely adore!
Textures: Ah, my favorite. No matter your medium, textures offer unlimited learning opportunities. Think of mixed media and how you can rev up your creative practice by playing with different mediums (acrylics, gouache, permanent markets, inks, paper collages, the list goes on…) to spice up your work.
This is perhaps the very best way to exercise that imagination and get out of a creative rut. Abstracts offer a stylized, different interpretation of a sometimes familiar view or at times are simply the representation of a feeling or a reality which the artist gets out of their head and onto the canvas. This allows each viewer to potentially derive something different from the painting.
Plein-Air:
Although intimidating to some, painting “plein-air” or “outdoors”, is a great test of your observational skills. My advise on how to tackle this: Don’t overcomplicate it. No fancy tools required. This could be something as simple as sitting out in your balcony and making a rough color study of the trees or plants in your back yard. Try this exercise across different times of the day (to see how your observation of light and shadows changes) as well as during different seasons.
Local urban sketching meet-ups are a fantastic way to get together with a small group and visit a local park/building/special monument/eatery, etc to capture the vibe of that place. At the end of the day, urban sketching and plein-air painting is something different to everyone. It is what YOU make of it. If simple color studies are your jam - go for it! If you love adding every minute detail using a fine micron pen, great idea!
Now I know what you’re thinking, “but Nikita, how am I ever going to paint/draw/illustrate an animal/landscape/abstract when I mostly tackle easier subject matter?” My advice: Just do it. Take the first step. Break it down into smaller, manageable chunks of subject matter. For instance, if you have never painted animals before, start by understanding body proportions of big cats (i.e. a Leopard!) and sketch it until it becomes muscle memory. When you stop getting held back by the “but… what if… “ negative things you tell yourself, beautiful things happen and you will discover how your hands follow your brains lead in developing a better sense of observation for the new subject matter you have decided to paint.
Final pro tip: When attempting to spark your creativity by attempting to paint a different subject matter, self-criticism is the enemy of progress and will only drag you deeper into a downward spiral. Instead, try starting with small steps. If you cannot paint an intricate face of a leopard, simply tackle the shape of the body and refrain from letting the pressure of it needing to look “realistic” and “an exact copy of the reference image” from letting you experiment with that subject in the first place.
So, tell me in the comments below, what subject matter do you hope to delve into to shake up your creative practice? Until next week, happy creating!
A compilation of my sketchbooks or as they say “a browser with lots of tabs open and I have no idea where the music is coming from”. Diversity in subject matter and techniques helps in exercising different parts of our brain and accelerates our muscle memory.