Where to get artistic inspiration to fill your sketchbook
Stuck in a rut artistically and don’t what to draw? Or using Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration, only to realize you can’t sell pieces you really like because of royalty issues? Staring at a blank page with an empty mind can be the worst, so here are a few of my favorite places to get inspiration for my sketchbook or artwork when I don’t know what to create or where to get started.
For the websites I list below, I commonly use the photos for timed warm ups to get my creativity flowing and my hand warmed up.
A good warm up routine that I like to follow is to try two different 3-minute timed drawings and then one or two 5-minute timed drawings. You could do all four exercises and draw the same thing or switch it up each time with a new photo or item, I find the time pressure helps me get over the hesitation I tend to feel when starting a new piece.
For royalty-free images to use for your art: Pexels and Unsplash
These two sites provide beautiful photographs that you can use to draw direct inspiration from to create art . Pexels holds over 1 million royalty-free photos, and Unsplash has over 3 million free photos for you to use. These sites are great for inspiration, sketchbook warm ups, or subject studies and can even be printed and cut up to be collaged as part of a piece, the uses are really endless. Like all the other places I list in this blog, I use these websites for warm ups and for getting inspiration for sketchbook challenges I participate in. Below is a sketch of a truck I painted as a 5-minute warm up.
For drawing movement and gesture in animals and people: YouTube
I got this tip from the artist Louise Stigell and her Skillshare class Pencil Sketching for Beginner Artists: Improve Your Technique With Quick & Loose Animal Drawings . This is great way to get inspiration if you like to capture movement of things or are working on a range of poses of a subject, like animals and people. As we all know YouTube can be a black hole of content, but it never ceases to amaze me the range of videos uploaded on that site. In Louise’s Skillshare class we drew from videos of cameras set on up park tables with bird seed, pausing the videos to draw the birds attracted to the feed, working to capture the movement and gesture in their bodies. I use YouTube the most when drawing animals, its nice to get videos of them behaving in their natural habitat, but you can also use it to draw people and characters, to get a wide dynamic range of poses making it great for subject prep.
For drawing landscapes: MapCrunch and RandomStreetView
I got this tip from Emma Carlisle on her Patreon. These websites are essentially the same, and are amazing places for anyone that is practicing their landscape painting skills. When you hit the Next button on RandomStreetView or the Go button on MapCrunch, you get a random google earth location that you can use for painting or drawing practice. These sites are also great for practicing houses or buildings.
For warm ups and general drawing improvement: random household objects
Lastly, this has become my new favorite way to warm up when I start painting. After spending a few minutes doodling to warm up my hand (which alone does wonders to getting my creativity flowing), I spend about 10 minutes drawing 2-3 items around my house. Drawing random objects around the house challenges me to draw new shapes, or try new angles of things I usually wouldn’t draw. This reminds me to not stay to florals too much but to try new things that I would typically say I don’t know how or can’t draw/paint.
I find that after spending even 10 minutes warming up with one of the above things loosens me up and inspires me to create, things just seem to flow easier and I am freed from the pressure to create something beautiful and instead just enjoy the process.
So what do you think? Have any other good sources for artistic inspiration you can share?