Challenging Yourself Creatively

This is how exercise works: You exert a muscle beyond its capacity and it tears. Thousands of micro-ruptures erupt in the muscle fibres. That’s where the pain comes from. Your body being literally torn apart. But do you know how you get stronger after? The fibres knit themselves back together. More elastic this time. With greater tensile strength. So the muscle grows. It’s a painful process but it’s the only way to get stronger through exercise. And it’s exactly the same thing when it comes to art.

Creativity is a muscle. It must be exercised if not it gets soft; it atrophies and dies. There is no way to stand still; it must get stronger. How do you do this? By challenging yourself creatively of course. Well, what does that look like? Try to work in a medium you haven’t worked in before or at least one you don’t feel particularly confident in. Try to work in a genre you’re unfamiliar with. And not in a lazy way. Study the genre and actually try to do the best you can in it. Take on creative problems you have avoided. All artists understand this. There are things we shy away from and instead we should steer towards them.

In this way, you’ll find that you get better at your work. Your creativity becomes stronger. At Nsibidi Fables we try to push ourselves to get better creatively. Stronger. We think it helps. I hope it helps you too.