Loss of Motivation But Still Working

It’s on days like this that setting a minimum amount of acceptable work is paramount. I had a huge loss of motivation tonight and really didn’t know what to draw or paint and didn’t feel like doing any of it. But, no matter what I can get at least 30 minutes of something done.

All I did tonight was a warmup drawing and a figure drawing from photo reference. The funny thing is that the drawing went really well. I started by doing a gesture of the pose then began reworking it to get the proportion correct. Maybe it was because I chose an easier pose but I was at least happy with my progress and the loss of motivation wasn’t so bad at the end.

Loss of Motivation: 10 minute warmup
10 minute warmup

One of the biggest causes for my loss of motivation was not knowing exactly what to do. My wife and I went to a dinner tonight at a wildlife refuge and a person gave a talk about Alaska and showed some amazing photos of the landscape there. The landscape photos were so beautiful it got me thinking that maybe I should be doing landscape work. Which is very hard at the moment considering it gets dark here at 5pm now and I don’t get off work until around 4. I think I’m going to have to take some advice shared by Jame Gurney and maybe use some photo graphs to do landscape paintings and drawings.

Loss of Motivation: figure drawing setup
Figure drawing setup

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