What to Draw When You're Bored! 6 more IDEAS

Hey! I'm Darlene and you're watching Rapid Fire Art. Lately, I've been going through a bit of an artist block. For those of you that have been following my channel, you know I mostly draw realistic portraits. I find these very rewarding, but whenever I go from a finished piece to the next, aka a blank page, there's this huge psychological hurdle, to a point where I dread starting or even thinking about what to draw next. I knew I needed to keep drawing so I don't get rusty, so I started filling my sketchbook with anything and everything. In this video, I want to share some ideas that helped me enjoy drawing again. I think the key for me is to remove the pressures of creating something impressive or focusing too much on perfecting every detail and learn or relearn to just enjoy drawing again. Whether you're going through something similar or just looking for fun ideas to fill your sketchbook, I've got you. The first idea is a warm-up, a zen doodle. It's a great way to practice hand-eye coordination and build muscle memory, with no pressure of creating anything specific. First, you want to draw an outline of something you like. I drew a pencil outline of a kitten and just started filling it with different doodles, patterns, and shapes. It may seem a little scary at first to place the first doodle randomly. I'd recommend starting in a small, narrow area instead of a wide open area. More constraints actually makes it less intimidating to start. For this zen doodle, I'm using leaves, flowers, hearts, rainbows, and raindrops. But you can pick any doodle, shape, or pattern that you want. You can't really do it wrong. Try to squish them as close together as possible so it looks like there's a lot going on. And don't worry about trying to fit shapes perfectly with each other, like some elaborate brain teaser puzzle. As I went along, I started feeling more creative and free and decided to add cute faces to transform some of these shapes into characters. Once I filled up the kitten outline with shapes, I thickened the shapes along the outside border and filled in the spaces between them. There's something very satisfying about this inking process. The drawing became bold and started to pop. Coloring is completely optional but was actually my favorite part of this whole drawing because this is when it started coming to life for me. And I love how this ended up looking. Zen doodles start off as simple random doodles of shapes and patterns but always end up being a drawing that I like flipping through in my sketchbook. By the way, don't feel the need to complete this in one sitting. I actually have several unfinished zen doodle pages to use as a quick warm-up and just stop whenever I'm ready to move on. Zero commitment. The second idea is tiny doodles. It's perfect for when you're not ready to commit to a full drawing. Just like the last one, don't feel the need to complete the whole page. Draw as many or as little as you feel like and pick it up at any time. The cool thing about this when you're feeling a bit commitment-phobic is you don't need to add too much detail to any individual drawing. Think of them as icon level drawings. I just completed a Jurassic Park movie marathon so I picked the theme of dinosaurs and then just drew anything related to it. All types of dinosaurs, fossils, trees. I especially love the volcanoes. And don't worry, you don't actually need to draw 100 different unique drawings. You can repeat or slightly modify an existing drawing just like I've done all over the page. And as you can probably tell, these don't need to be perfect at all but when you look at them all together on a page, it actually looks great. The completed page kind of reminds me of sticker sheets and the assortment makes it fun to look through and explore. This next one is called the continuous line drawing. As the name implies, the whole drawing is done in one continuous line with no lifting of the pen. This is a great one to try when you're wanting to overcome perfectionism and also when you're short on time. These drawings can be done in seconds or minutes. One line for the whole drawing? I know it sounds difficult but it was really effective in getting me to not take myself or the drawing too seriously. I think knowing that the style of this drawing is loosey-goosey helped remove my constant need for accuracy. As soon as I made my first mistake, my mind felt more free already. By the way, I used a marker instead of a pencil which added an extra level of challenge as there was sort of a time limit to it. If I stopped for too long to think, the ink will bleed out. It really forced me to keep my hand moving and to stop overthinking and just play. As I did more and more continuous line drawings, I found myself embracing mistakes and trying to make the best of them and sometimes that's just what we need. All in all, I'm quite happy with how this turned out as a drawing. I colored it in but offset the colors to balance out the car's stretched out look. I think it has such a unique minimalist look to it and can really stand on its own as an art piece. It's so tempting to compare yourself to other artists and feel bad that you're not doing as good as them. I do the same. Jordan Peterson said, Don't compare yourself with other people. Compare yourself with who you were yesterday. I feel it's so applicable to artists. This brings me to the next idea. Redraw an old artwork of yours. The older, the better. Here's why. The older the drawing, the more likely you'll be able to improve upon it. Here's a turtle I drew 16 years ago. I remember thinking, Wow, this is the best turtle I've ever drawn. I better tape over it to preserve this finished product. Looking at it now, I can immediately pick out areas I want to improve on. It was a decent sketch and a good start but a shame I left it at that. Also, barely visible. This time around, I want it to be more bold so the turtle will pop out instead of looking washed out. I vividly recall shying away from all the skin patterns because I thought it might ruin the drawing. Drawing the skin pattern actually reminded me a bit of doing Zentangles. Interesting how translatable seemingly unrelated drawings can be. With the glare, it's hard to see but I've shaded very dark. To boost the contrast further, I applied pastel chalk. Probably went a little overboard with it but that's okay since I think one of the beauties of sketchbook drawing is it's meant for exploration. Sometimes, we can all use a little reminder of the progress we've made. Oh, and when you're done, don't forget to date it. Who knows, maybe in a few years, you'll look back at it and think, Wow, this drawing could be so much better. Why did I stop there? And then redraw it again. This next idea is my favorite. I find it helps me to think more creatively, allowing me to explore silly ideas and enables my mind to do a complete reset as I dive into a new fantastical world. Idea number five is to create contrasting worlds. For my drawing here, I created a non-suspicious mushroom forest but with a very top secret tech facility below. Like any proper top secret facility, there are watchmen. Two of them. Can you find them? Take the elevator down and you may be greeted by Mr. Headgoop who is in charge of the whole harvesting process of mushroom slime. And this is not some little facility harvesting laughable quantities of slime. The presence of a train suggests that this is part of a much, much bigger network and organization. I'm getting carried away, but you get the idea. It was so much fun to add all the little details while exploring and creating a whole new world. Make up a language, add characters, add nonsensical pipes that connect to absolutely nothing or change the direction of gravity. It's your world and no one can tell you what's right or wrong. Now, I didn't have the whole idea fleshed out beforehand. It kind of just built upon itself as I went along. It's fun to select highly contrasting scenes. For example, a creepy crawly rock band underneath a Buddhist temple or an archaic civilization hiding under Antarctica. Don't be shy to use a lot of resources to pull inspiration from. Once you've sketched some elements, the rest of the piece will fall into place more easily. Feel free to take this mushroom slash harvesting facility idea and make it your own. Have some good ideas? Drop them in the comment section. I'm curious what themes you guys come up with. My last idea is to do your art through another lens. I mostly draw portraits in the style of realism, so I decided to look up different styles of portrait art to try out something completely different from my own. Eventually, what ended up catching my eye was caricatures. Being one to focus so much on accuracy and realism, I found it so amazing how artists can exaggerate the subject's features so much and somehow the drawing still looks immediately recognizable. Drawing a caricature seemed a bit intimidating for me since it was so different from what I usually do. So I decided to look at other people's work and just try to replicate it to let my mind and hands feel the style first. This was my recreation of Tom Richmond's caricature of Hugh Laurie. He's a master caricature artist. The half-closed eyelids, his face shape, and his mouth were so exaggerated yet spot on. It takes a very keen eye and great observation skills to be able to recognize and distill out the essence of a person. So this was not my first attempt. I drew three and I think the sequence of my drawings are pretty evident, but I love that in a sketchbook. Seeing progress when I try something new. By the time I got to the third one, I was excited to draw another. But for the next one, I'll try creating my own original caricature. Choosing what to exaggerate myself instead of copying from Tom Richmond's work. I think it's a fun way to work on identifying what are the most important elements to focus on and it felt like a refreshing way to analyze faces from a completely different perspective. This sketchbook page was the one that got me mentally ready to try another realistic portrait again. These are my favorite ideas to fill my sketchbook when I'm experiencing art blocks. Instead of completely stepping away from drawing, I found it fun and effective to just experiment with completely different drawing styles and gradually let the fun of drawing ooze back into my life. I hope you're excited to try out these ideas and if you have other suggestions, please share them in the comment section so we can all help each other out. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one!