When it comes to building your creative skills, you need to be willing to take risks in order to advance your abilities. While your efforts may not lead to success every time, you will still be boosting your creative talents and building skills that will serve you well in the future. The fear that you might make a mistake or fail in your efforts can paralyze your progress.
 Whenever you find yourself harboring such feelings, remind yourself that mistakes are simply part of the process. While you may occasionally stumble on your path to creativity, you will eventually reach your goals. Creativity is a state of mind. Telling yourself or others "I'm not very creative," or "I can never come up with new or clever ideas," destroys that state of mind. For long-term creative thinking, read and study books on positive thinking. Some classic titles include
Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking and Robert H. Schuller's Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!
The The Creative Artist is crammed with ideas. The information is presented through text descriptions, sketches, finished painting
and step-by-step examples.