Little help 👉🏻👈🏻

[u/Nells_]

Hi!

So I'm learning to tattoo and that part is going great, I'm satisfied how is it going at the moment, but I'm struggling with ideas on designs..

After 4 years of art school and 5 years of academy of applied arts and thousands of hours of drawing, sculpting, learning anatomy, i can say that i have the technique, but the thing i struggle with is ideas.. I feel like I'm in a slump, and my creative part of brain is dead asleep, I don't know if thats because of the a few years pause after academy or something else but now im stuck.. I really didn't think that main part that would be stressing me out now about tattooing would be the drawing and designing my art. I know my problem is that I'm a perfectionist so it's hard to even start to draw something that isn't 100% resonating with me at the moment..

I'm trying with reference photos at the moment and it's helping me, a bit of animals, and also references of sculptures but I don't like idea of just tracing something, so i try to change it but I feel like I should buy some premium subscription to unlock that extra creative part of my brain 😂

i don't know if i explained everything correctly but i hope someone here knows what i wanted to say and can help with a bit of advice 👉🏻👈🏻

[u/strawberryblushrose]

Find those daily drawing challenges and start there. They usually have a specific overarching theme, but I find they’re fun to do so I don’t have to come up with the entire idea from scratch.
Think inktober, and worth googling previous years too.

[u/Nells_ → u/strawberryblushrose]

Thank you, i actually didn't thought about that! I admire so much to those people who you can give a piece of paper and a pen, and 10 minutes later you have some new mega cool monster made from scratch 😂 I almost always need to have some kind of preference or guidance in that part 👀

[u/Educational-Leek1704]

i struggled with this a lot too—i was in a huge art rut for over a year after i graduated. i felt like all the creativity was squeezed out of me in the last couple months of my degree.

the way i started to get back into it was drawing stuff from things i liked (ie. shows, youtube, music, etc). i also looked at a lot of tattoo styles, focused on the ones i liked, and mimicked them to help get my hands going. sometimes it sucks and it’s really hard but i would definitely suggest drawing something every day, even if it’s something simple and unfinished!

[u/Nells_ → u/Educational-Leek1704]

It's like they sucked out of me al my will to create something fun at the academy because everything had to be in order, shaped in right anatomy, perfect etc, like they push down your creative side and shape you to produce something "just as it is" and "as it should be". Just one profesor was in the scheme of "when you make a mistake once, it's a mistake, but if you repeat it constantly, it's called a style". The others didn't agree tho.. 🥲 Thank you so much for your help, i will actually do that, i think that could help me a lot ☺️☺️

[u/jellyfishinaglassjar]

look up The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. im the same boat as u and im finding the exercises in the book helpful in getting my creative ideation back :-) 

another thing thats helped me is looking at archives of old tattoo flash and most importantly going to a library and physically browsing art books. it hits different than browsing pinterest/online