Interviews

Moving on with my research, I conducted four in-depth interviews with three amateur artists as well as one professional artist to get an insight on how people experience art block and how they currently engage with the craft of drawing. The professional illustrator’s interview was really insightful in terms of giving me information on how they managed to overcome the issues many amateur artists currently have, and how it affected their personal career path.

I got a lot of interesting information that will surely be useful later during the project as well.

Some of the core key insights that I’m currently going to focus on are:

• People have different approaches to what helps them to overcome an art block: some need time and a chance to draw casually, stay on their comfort zone and relax. Others need a structured approach with schedules and deadlines in order to keep drawing.
• Both amateur and professional illustrators suffer from external pressure, but professionals have the mindset to overcome it.
• Amateur illustrators have high standards that create extra pressure to draw only ”finished” pieces, making it difficult to actually start drawing anything.
• Amateur artists don’t see the value of doing only small or ”casual” sketches, whereas people who have managed to overcome art block and other difficulties noted that it’s really valuable to see that even the small things contribute to the overall improvement.
• Finding time to draw is really difficult.
• It’s easier to start drawing with a familiar medium and subjects, as well as drawing established characters.
• Seeing the hard work pay off makes people feel accomplished.
• Changing attitude is the key – not measuring personal value through the drawings, but perceiving drawing as a craft that can be improved.
• All interviewees use their phone to look for references when drawing.

I created two Personas (loosely based on the interviews) in order to help me target the project better: