Flow states with Cyborg Sirens make everything better.......

I began to adopt a practice last year, to encourage more play and instinctive results when it comes to concepts and sketching. In moments when I’m feeling tired or overwhelmed by workload or a deadline or a project yet to be conceptualised, I found I’d freeze and get nothing done. One of my creative procrastinations surprisingly became a meditative process and I now implement it as soon as I feel the paralysis creeping up. I allow myself between half an hour and an hour to draw something. Anything. There is no expectation and it doesn’t matter what ends up on the page. I am not allowed a reference, but there are no other restrictions. Once the time is up, the image can be tossed aside if I hate it. If there’s potential for development, perhaps I’ll save it for further work. Either way, it’s’ going into my imagination, conjuring up a thing. What I find during this activity is that I enter a flow state. I often manage to get into ‘the zone’ when I’m working in a hyper focused manner, but for these imaginative studies, it’s like a super quick propelled version of that. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of drawing for fun which is what we do when we are kiddiwinks. Perhaps it’s the abandonment of ‘real work’ which transforms the task into a forbidden fruit, making it more tantalising. But it always has interesting results and it reignites the creative flame. Occasionally it’s the very act of procrastinating that suddenly jerks my brain into action and the illustration problem I’ve spent all day unable to solve, is magnificently apparent-hanging there in the disemboweled remnants of a cyborg siren. The takeaway is, as soon as I tell myself I’m blocked creatively-I have to intervene with a new angle and a new set of rules (or in this case no rules). I made a little timelapse of this strange concept sketch which grew from an instance of frustrated ’I am crap and I have no ideas’ syndrome. The moral of the story is, turn off the thinking and let the subconscious (and in my case, disturbed) cogs of your mind fix your deadlines for you.....