Creative insecurity is the leading cause for artist burnout. Feeling uninspired, lost for motivation and overwhelmed with stimuli are increasingly common in any artist’s journey, and make the desire to create even more daunting. With the help of new digital tools on the market, we’ve taken the liberty to break down our 5 best-loved apps to guide your creativity when you’ve reached a stagnation in your inspiration. 

Get organised: Mindly

Life happens, and without an outlet to release overthinking thoughts, anxieties and your daily to-do lists, the space to create can never flourish. Enter Mindly – a new organisation system that helps place all your thoughts and project ideas in one place, differentiated by association to keep “your inner universe” as mindful as possible. By building visual mind-maps and hierarchical structures of your entries, Mindly mimics the outline of your “solar system of thought” and is a great starter tool when identifying where those creativity gaps lie. An outstanding user interface and experience for both Apple and Android users, this app is a must have to help get organised and get your creative juices flowing.

Get focused: Brain.fm

The relationship between music and creative cognition is nothing short of astonishing. A 2020 study published in the Psychology of Music journal found that listening to music not only improves divergent thinking; the way the mind generates ideas beyond proscribed expectations but also increases the release of dopamine, a chemical which drives motivation to explore new territories, in turn boosting creativity. Brain.fm does just this – a research backed platform that customises music and background sound to enhance productivity and creativity with a key focus on guiding your brain to it’s desired mental state. Ideal for users on IOS and Google Play, with a variety of options to explore what works best for you.

Get inspired: Behance

Austin Kleon’s Steal like an Artist dissects the unspoken rules of being a creative, with the first rule encouraging those stuck in an inspiration block to revisit the works of their artistic heroes and engage in good theft –  honouring, studying, crediting and transforming their ideas. Adobe’s very own Behance is a creative networking platform for visual artists; graphic designers, illustrators, fashion creatives, photographers etc., and allows for users to share their collections with like minded audiences. A place to meet artists and get inspired by the boiling pot of creative content, attract new opportunities, and finally, form a creative community of your own, Behance has it all. Available across platforms, impeccable UI and free for use across multiple disciplines. 

Get challenged: Word Palette

Creative writing allows for your imagination to unlock new realms of creativity which may have previously been left unexplored, gate-keeping the potential to grow exciting ideas and hone new ones. Word Palette acts as the experimental creative writer’s guide to unleashing your creativity and eliminating writer’s block. It’s intelligently scrambled text acts as prompts to help guide your path through a written project, and presents you with a challenge that encourages outworldly creation. A fairly new addition to the creative digital app space, it has gained a cult following through it’s options to add your own inspirational articles/stories and integrate those into your writing. Unfortunately this app is only available for IOS users for the time being. 

Get started: Procreate

With masses of technology integrated into our everyday lives, taking the time to disconnect and engage in art therapy has proven to stimulate creativity, improve memory and encourage stress relief. Sketching without distraction can assist entering into a Flow State – a term popularised by positive psychologists Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura, describing a state that “leads to a sense of ecstasy and clarity: [you] know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other.” The holy-grail art studio on-the-go, Procreate is a phenomenal platform for this; to get immersed in a world of art and visual expression. A two time award-winning app for artists of all kinds; it’s wide range of tools, education access platform and creatives filled community provides the ultimate stepping stone to get lost in your creative flow. Available exclusively on the Apple App Store.