Reply To: How do you deal with burnout?

[Adrian Bellworthy]

Hey @wendy10698,

Is it burnout, or is it motivation/lack of ideas?

Burnout would usually occur when you experience long-term stress in your job, or when you have worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time.

All artists have periods with a lack of motivation or ideas.

Your experience I would guess is due to a fairly intense period of activity, being involved in our challenges and working your way through the courses, the excitement and anticipation of joining this years collaboration, but still being a couple of months away, gives way to a lull period.

My advice is to just do something, keep practicing. Sometimes I watch Darrin Lile on YouTube, he has a series of videos as he works on different projects. Just watching and listening I find quite entertaining as well as informative, which intern can increase motivation and ideas.

You’re doing the right thing in following the rocket course, even if your skill level is beyond this course, anything is better than nothing. I noticed you started the Pothead course, I am convinced you have the ability to finish the course with a great result. You also created an awesome Celebi for the Pokemon challenge, take a look at some of the other challenges, they are still there to provide a project to work on in the lull periods, judging is closed but inspiration isn’t.

I wrote an article recently, i-m-learning-blender-what-should-i-do-next. In the article I try to draw a focus to the stages of creating anything in Blender with a step by step process. From inspiration to final composition and rendering. Quite often we tend to focus all our energy on modelling and texturing, when there is so much more to the process, probably the most important being inspiration and ideas in my opinion. Without inspiration and ideas, the canvas remains blank.

By understanding the stages and steps to creating art, it may inspire a new focus of learning Blender, composition for example. By learning more about composition you could re-energise past projects, again this can in turn, increase motivation. The article is also full of links to other articles and courses to help get through this difficult period.

I commend you for reaching out, and by doing so others will know they are not alone and its not a shortfall in anyone’s ability.

Happy Blending.