Hone Your Creativity With Persistence

Over the last few weeks I’ve spent many hours simply drawing. For the first time in a long time, I’ve shown persistence with drawing sunflowers and mandalas.

I’m going with a theme and the goal is to turn these images into a future coloring book. I really enjoy drawing floral and obviously I’m all about the mandalas. But it’s hard, damn hard, to sit and draw a variation of the same thing.

Persistence and creativity, I believe, are linked. In many ways, you can’t have one without the other. Creativity creates the art.

Persistence hones the craft.

Some will say without the craft what’s the point? Why have a vision or pursue your creative side without mastering technique and the use of tools. I say the desire to create is a basic human desire. At some point in our lives, we’ve all made something.

We all create. Whether for school, work or play. But how many of us really know the craft? Where do we learn the craft and how to express our creative desires?

Persistence.

How many times are we told don’t give up. I tell my 6-year-old all the time. Don’t give up. Just try. Keep going. You don’t know until you try.

But how often do we as creatives tell ourselves to keep at it?

Frustration Fosters Creativity

How often do you get frustrated with your creativity? Lately, I’m not so much frustrated with my creativity as much as with my tools.

I’m learning a new lens for my Nikon D3300 (old school peeps). I’m also tinkering with my catalog settings in Facebook Business Manager for my eCommerce store.

Part of my problem is a lack of patience. I don’t have any.

The other part of my frustration is I hold extremely high expectations on myself. So, when I can’t figure something out or I don’t nail the task on the first go around…I get frustrated.

Silly, I know.

But I keep going because that frustration won’t go away. Out of the frustration comes a sense of creative purity.

It’s not the tools, the new lens or social media. It’s the creative behind it all. How often do you ask…