Motivation to practice

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I love art and I want to practice and improve my skills.
But I always put it off, I will say, "I'll do it another day" or I will get distracted!
How do you motivate yourselves to paint or draw or play an instrument, whatever it is you do?

Make it a habit. If there is a specific time in the day that you usually have the time, then just make that initial effort every day to practice. Maybe you can only work for 10 minutes when you first start out, but after a week you may find you can sustain your work sessions longer and longer.

Having a specific place to work is helpful. For example, I have an office in my basement where I do some computer graphics work. And I have a small, almost empty, brightly lit room upstairs where I write. When I am in these spaces, I tend to focus on that specific kind of work and my mind doesn't wander as much.

Creative work is difficult. It can be personally rewarding, but often you do the work and no body really cares. It can become quite demoralizing unless you find your own personal reason to keep going. It helps to focus on the work itself rather than any reward you might hope to get from having done the work.

The first thing I do is admit I like what I'm trying to be creative with and be skilled at. If I can't do that, I dump whatever it is and never come back to it. I did this with music. I've found that I'm not musically inclined at all. I took a years worth of piano lessons, and struggled with it. I realized that I don't have good hearing, and I have occasional spurts of coordination problems. I gave up because I found I didn't enjoy it and it was to much a struggle. I don't confuse this with actual task specific work within the creative task. You may find that if you practice a musical instrument, you hate a particular song, or if you make jewelry, you hate a particular piece mid assembly. That happens. But for me I write, craft jewelry, do ceramics, make costume props, draw abstract art, make fractal art, assemble and paint miniatures, and pyrograph because I've found I enjoy it. I don't sing, play a musical instrument, dance, act, orate, or paint/draw non-abstract artwork because I've found I don't enjoy it, but I've tried them to find that out. You can practice all you want, but if your hearts not in it, you won't succeed and may even grow to hate it and sabotage yourself.

The second thing is that I have to admit my creation is inherently flawed from the getgo and practice will improve, but not neccessarily make perfect. This isn't to say that it won't help make it more perfect than it was. It may even potentially be perfect at some future date, but if it was perfect now, then I shouldn't be practicing, and thus today, for my skill I'm practicing, it is not perfect. As an example I butchered a prop last friday trying to make it work and broke it because I was sick or something and didn't realize it. I couldn't hammer a nail for the life of me. After 12 attempts at nailing a nail into it and either bending the nail, or putting it in at a wrong angle or the wrong place, a piece of the prop broke off, having been shaken loose. This was after, I did a really bad job of attempting to paint it. What does that have to do with being flawed. It was a sh***y paint job, and my hammering a nail skill for some reason needed improvement(not really, I was sick and didn't realize it) to start with. Despite that, I figured I could salvage it, and it's more practice to turn the prop into something that's different yet serve the same purpose for the costume in question. The same goes for my writing. It's easier to write out low quality stuff, then rewrite later, instead of with each sentence or even word focus on perfection and slow to a crawl and feel like I'm going nowhere. I don't worry about perfection in the initial write. That's for a rewrite to build on and attempt a perfection, and even then it still may not be perfect, but it will be better.

The next thing is to find time. It's what I struggle with the most. I suck at time management which is a skill in and of itself. If you can solve this or don't have a problem with it then it's a step in the right direction. If you don't have or make time for your skill improvement then it will never happen. I haven't had any time in the last four days to write, other than a three hour period on Sunday morning which I used and got some out. And also I woke up this morning after 3 hours of sleep and capitalized on being awake and got out some more writing before falling back asleep. I don't see any time for writing until maybe Thursday, or next sunday because I have poor time management to get things done. Although I've probably overestimated how long what I've got scheduled will take, which I normally do. At least this this week I haven't committed myself to be in two places at once, that I know of, and that's happened before. But time management, whether it's making time, or finding time is key.

Keep going.

Simple as!

First understand, as an artist we are by our natures egoists, and lean to procrastination. Without feeding our ego, we have little incentive to practice, and thus don't improve, and thus starve the ego in a self repeating cycle. You need incentive, we all do.

For much of history we were an elevated position when practiced, with patrons and fans of our works. We still need the recognition of our works, and fans to what we do. Without it we become starving artists

My rules of artistic motivation.
1. Set up a deviantArt account where you can put your art up. (Think of it as an online gallery, you can show or sell art and use as a portfolio.)
2. Scan and put up some of your art, this will give you feedback by other artists and give you further incentive to put up new works.
3. Submit your better works to groups on dA, this will expand your arts exposure, increase a fanbase and increase your incentive to put up new works.

Nothing is more rewarding as an artist than having a fanbase to validate what an artist does. Groups are how you build fanbase and you might end up finding yourself producing art for your fanbase.

If you already have a dA account, I'd advise put up more art and increase your gallery.