Blocked, huh? 5 ways to conquer The Blank Screen Of Doom.
We’ve all been there: staring down a blank page, cursor blinking, pencil frozen over the iPad like a deer in the headlights. Creative block isn’t a sign you’re a fraud, it’s just a sign your brain needs a different kind of challenge.
Instead of fighting it, try one of these five low-stakes tricks to remind your brilliant brain that making stuff is fun, not just work.
1. The 10-Minute Mess
Stop trying to force the big project you think you should be doing. That pressure is the problem. Instead, set a timer for 10 minutes and force yourself to make something messy, tiny, and completely useless.
This is your palate cleanser. Try a medium you rarely touch (watercolours, charcoal, a single sock) or give yourself a weird, low-stakes challenge: draw 10 genuinely bad frogs, or write a single, terrible haiku. The point is to create with zero pressure for it to be good. When the timer goes off, stop. Nice one! You’ve reminded your brain that making stuff isn’t always Perfection Central.
2. Ditch ya Desk
If you’re stuck, chances are your routine is stuck, too. Your physical environment and background noise have a massive impact on your creativity.
Are you always drawing at the same desk, at the same time, listening to the same ‘Lo-Fi Beats to Chill/Study To’ playlist? Mix it up, baby! Try sketching at a coffee shop, sitting outside, or working in the evening if you usually work in the morning. New input from the environment (the smell of rain, a podcast instead of music, a new view,) can give your brain the fresh perspective it desperately needs.
3. "Steal" Something Small
Sometimes the best way to get your juices flowing is to gather and deconstruct. Go on a deep dive into artists or creators you admire. Don’t just look at their finished work, look at their process.
Now, here’s the trick: copy one small element of their work into your own subject matter. Don’t copy the whole piece, but try their specific colour palette, their brush texture, or the compositional layout they used. It’s a structured way to practice a new technique without the crushing pressure of invention, and it quickly fills your mental toolbox.
4. Impose a Wild Constraint
Creativity loves boundaries. When you have infinite choices, it’s paralysing (“I can make anything! AAAAAHHHHH!”). When you have strict, arbitrary rules, your brain switches into problem-solving mode.
Give yourself a ridiculous constraint for your next piece:
•”I can only use three colours.”
•”The subject must be upside down.”
•”I have 30 minutes to finish this entire draft.”
This forces you to find innovative ways around the rule, and that process of solving a self-imposed problem is what gets the creative muscles moving again.
5. The Anxiety Dump
Sometimes your block isn’t due to a lack of ideas, but from having too many anxious, half-baked thoughts blocking the runway.
Grab a notebook and do a free-form writing dump for about five minutes. Don’t lift your pen. Write about why you’re blocked, what you want to make, what project you hate, what you had for breakfast…literally any mental clutter that comes to mind. Often, the real source of your anxiety (or a genuinely good, buried idea) will bubble up to the surface. Once you see it on the page, you can finally deal with it.
Remember, a creative block is often just your brain asking for a break or a change of scenery. Give it one of these low-pressure challenges and see what happens.
Happy creating!
