Use it or lose it

I am a firm believer that creativity isn’t something that some people have and others don’t. It is something that is grown and cultivated and the more we use our creativity the more creative we become. However, if we don’t cultivate our creativity it slowly begins to wither and die. I’ll be the first to admit that I have been in that situation. I slowly let myself get stuck in a rut and before I knew it, being creative had become SOOO hard!

When I was in university one of my professors used to talk about different approaches to design projects. A little back history, I studied communication design at Emily Carr University back in the day. Anyway, she would talk about planning a project from start to finish, making sure all the aspects of the project made sense and conceptually fit together. But on the opposite end of the spectrum was the force fit project. This is the kind of project that happens when a client has some random idea that they are set on, “I want a fish in my logo!” but they run a florist shop. Gawd, what are you supposed to do with that? How do you force two random concepts together and make them work? Working on these types of projects while sometimes maddening, can really push your creativity. It forces you to think outside the box and to push your ideas and concepts further.

When I realized that I had been in a bit of a creative stalemate I didn’t want to go down that road again. Now I am always trying to increase my creativity. To do so I have started a daily creative morning routine. (I’m sure that at some point I’ll go into more detail about that.) During this time I set up little project or tasks for myself, like the force fit project, to keep my creativity flowing.

How does it work?
The idea behind a force fit project is pretty simple and can be applied to virtually any creative project, photograph, painting, drawing, design… you name it. The images that I’m am sharing here are from one such project that I worked on last week. I took inspiration for a drawing from two really different sources and tried to figure out a way to include both inspiration sources in one drawing.

Lately, I have been really inspired by the portraiture work of Louis Thomas. Drawing people is something that I find pretty fun, but to be totally honest I’m pretty bad at it. All the people I draw have comically large heads and emaciated limbs. Case and point the popsicle girl up at the top of the page. But I like it, so I carry on. For this illustration, I found a girl in one of my Sartorialist books to draw and my second point of inspiration for my little project came from an early morning spent out at a local farm picking blueberries. I wanted to incorporate the berry bushes and the colour of the early morning sky into my illustration of the girl from my book.

These little projects can be a simple or as complicated as you want them to be. I like to set myself a time constraint otherwise I could carry on all day trying to come up with the BEST idea. I find that limiting myself to say an hour, really helps me to focus, come up with an idea and execute before I get bogged down in the details. Good luck and happy creating!

Tina