As creatives, there are struggles we have that others don’t see as problems. If your professional work is creative, people think it’s easy to “just” dream up ideas, “just” take pictures of stuff, or “just” paint, write, or draw all day. Inspiration for those wonderful ideas has to come from somewhere, and some days you’re tapped out. Here are four ways that help me stay creative that might help you too.

Fill yourself up with the work of other artists not in your genre.

If you’re a writer like me, soak up paintings. If you’re an illustrator, watch movie shorts made on iPhones, so on and so forth. Actively cross-pollinating between other expressions of art gives you larger stash to draw from when you need an idea. You never know when the wire sculpture you admired will come back to you in another form you can use in your own work. [Read more…]