My creative process: feel antsy, sit down to create, make ugly work, feel blah, make more ugly work, still feel blah, keep at it, finally make something pretty good.
I’m at that first “feel blah” stage. Aside from my weekly print, I haven’t spent much time in my studio the past few weeks, and I really felt it today, when everything I created sucked.
If you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you know that crappy work is just a part of the process. Your creative system has to purge all the gunk that’s been building up while you weren’t paying attention to it. You regurgitate bad work, make bad copies of things you’ve seen, try out ideas that were bad to begin with, but won’t go away until you put them on paper.
This part of the process sucks. But here it is. Here I am. And I’ll be back here tomorrow – and the day after, and the day after that – because experience has shown me that something good is at the end of this. For now, though, I’m hoping that I’ll hit the “still feel blah” stage soon.
Thanks for this, I always thought my problem was not being realxed enough and putting too much pressure on the outcome. You gave me a whole new perspective.