coming out of your comfort zone

It's easy to get stuck in a rut creatively, especially when you're time poor - even if you're not spending much time working in the way you think you want to day to day, you can then find when you do get the chance you're retracing old steps and not really doing anything new.

One way to tackle this is to find something structured that will push you to try new things. Paid classes, as I've mentioned before, are a good way to do this. Another class I took late last year was screenrprinting. Although I'd done screenprinting at university, the actual technique was a distant memory, so it was good to try again and really get my hands dirty. It also gave me the opportunity to look at how I make things differently. As screenprints are built out of layers of colour and shape, so I started to look at things I was making and imagine how I would break it down into those individual layers and and shapes.

Another way to step out of your comfort zone is to take on a challenge. Inktober has become a very popular yearly challenge for artists, creating a drawing in ink each day for a month while following a list of prompts. Of course, you don't even have to follow this to the letter - you might find you just enjoy the shift to ink and paper but don't mind about the prompts, or you stick to the list but use a different medium. You might not get a drawing out every day - it happens! You're busy. But having something external imposing a routine on you might just be enough to get you making more art than usual.