Drawing Tutorial: 3 Ways to Unblock Your Creativity

Learn 3 simple and easy techniques to escape creative block with Mattias Adolfsson

Mental blocks are an inevitable part of any artist’s creative process, especially when working under pressure. But it’s a good idea to take a break instead of getting frustrated, and improve your skills with basic drawing exercises to stimulate your mind and get you back to your creative sweet spot.

Mattias Adolfsson (@mattiasadolfsson), is a renowned Swedish illustrator. He has worked for animation studios including: Nickelodeon, Dreamworks and Disney. In this post, he shares his top 3 strategies for unblocking your creativity and turns a pencil into your best weapon against creative block.

Take the next step with this video:

3 Ways to Unblock Your Creativity

1. Choose an unconventional way to create drawings

Mattias decides to draw animals upside down, or from memory, to allow him to explore new perspectives while perfecting his illustration skills.

Choosing an unconventional format that defies traditional standards allows you to find new and fun ways of imagining the world.

2. Select and draw a word at random

Find a book and open it at a random page. Choose a word or phrase (also at random) and draw it. Mattias landed on “individual reader“ and had to find a way to draw this unusual concept using nothing but a pencil and his imagination.

This exercise is designed to boost your creativity by asking you to improvise a drawing, which will get you out of your comfort zone. It also refines your illustration skills, allowing you to react to your client’s and brand’s requests.

3. Turn something ordinary on its head

One of the most ingenious ways to use your creativity is to imagine a routine object or situation, and turn it on its head. This will allow you to transform something ordinary into an original and funny drawing.

In the following example, Mattias turns the tables on his diners, allowing a vegetable to devour a human, which is slightly bizarre and also rather funny.

Now that you’ve discovered a few drawing exercises to unblock your creativity, you can carry on expanding your illustration skills with Mattias Adolfsson’s online course: Creative Sketching: Fill Your Illustrations With Life and Detail.

You may also like:

- The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art, a course by Mattias Adolfsson.
- Illustration Tutorial: How to Use Light.
- Drawing Tutorial: Graphic Techniques for Designing Tattoos from Scratch.