Posts filed under ‘creative • prompt’
Creative Pay-it-Forward
This week’s project - A challenge to create something
for someone else and send it – a creative pay-it-forward.
Get inspired by the people you love and make something
as a gift and send it along for any reason or no reason at all.
Creative Prompt: When was the last time you made something -
wrote a letter, concocted a special dish, drew or doodled, painted or
played with clay, broke out in spontaneous song,
danced barefoot in the grass or built a snow statue?
The Joy of Discovery
I recently watched a group of young children painting. Some were cautious and planned out each color and its placement carefully before they even picked up a brush. Others let the paint wander, and their minds with it, changing their creation and giving new names with every stroke. Then it was my turn. I picked up my white paper plate. I tried to remember what it was like to be a kid. To let the colors play. Enjoying discovering what happens when red mixes with yellow or green. Sometimes in order to create something new, we have to forget that we already know everything.
Creative Prompt: What are the assumptions and expectations that we have when we begin a creative endeavor? Is there such a thing as a blank canvas? How are you making space in your life to create?
Color Promptings
Days of changing colors. Green to gold. Red to brown. I love how color makes us notice even the most obvious things that blend into the background through visual routine. Color wakes us up to our surroundings. Lights change and we alter our actions. Stop and Go. We are used to taking cues from color. Slowing down to watch the show of a sunset.
Creative Prompt: Take a color inventory. What colors do you surround yourself with? Is this accidental or intentional? If you had to live on a monochromatic island with only one color what would it be? Do you have a favorite color? How has it changed over the years? Try giving new names to colors. Get inspiration from color names in other languages.
140 Character Writing Contest
What can you do with 140 letters, spaces and punctuation marks? How many (or how few) words does it take to tell a story? The creative impulse sometimes tells us to get it all down on the page – to hold nothing back and keep the expression flowing. But the muse can also work in the reverse - carefully sculpting and shaping – finding just the right word or a new way to say the same thing. Each word is a hinge that can alter a sentence.
Gotham Writers’ Workshop is hosting a contest to see what exciting fiction, non fiction or poetry people can create with 140 characters or less. Join in and inspire us.
Free MIT Course on Creativity
School’s out for summer. But the creative mind is never at rest. Creative people understand that learning and discovery happen moment by moment and can be cultivated in many ways.
MIT offers free course content with no registration through their online program - OpenCourseWare OCW. Prof. Karen Boiko’s course “The Creative Spark” with reading lists and homework assignments is available for those who get excited by the word Syllabus and just cant wait to hit the books.
Twitter: What are You Creating?
I heard an interview of a band lately where the journalist asked a meandering question that ended with the usual “What are your creative influences?”
We all want to know what is behind the music or book or painting. The musician stammered a bit and threw out a few bones for the journalist to pick at.
It’s Spring and I’ve been doing some “cleaning” but mostly taking inventory after a long winter. I am surprised at what has accumulated in the dark corners and junk drawers. As I survey the bits & bobs, I begin to ask myself “What are your creative influences?” People. Places. Things. An accumulation of concepts and colors and connections. Sifting and sorting that eventually ends up on the page or in a dance or paint on my hands. We are often unaware of all the pieces that go into our creations. It’s an almost endless stream of what we have experienced – what we have seen and heard and smelled and touched and tasted. What we have felt and what we have forgotten. We stammer and we try to find the bones. The invisible structure of our movements and thoughts and utterances.
Twitter asks “What are you doing?” Well, I am taking a creative inventory of influences and inspirations. Trying to remember old ones and find new ones and pass them around. Please join me and share your own.
Spring Cleaning
Spending some time cleaning my desk and found again a snippet of an e.e. cummings poem I had cut from a book, painted and framed. The word “Spring” caught my attention. And I was reminded of the way poetry helps me keep time. Like a calendar I come back each year to versions of my self – to new ways of reading the familiar.
I went to search for my yellow paged copy of 73 poems and saw this line from 35 that I love
(existing’s tricky: but to live’s a gift)
- e.e.cummings
Creative prompt: Take stock – What’s in/on your desk? Is clutter the sign of a creative mind? When are you at your most creative – when things are in disaray or organized? What seeds of inspiration are hiding beneath the rubble of time and neglect? What can you unearth today that will grow into something new tomorrow?
Creative Spark: TED Talks
Something old. Something new. Sometimes it just takes the intervention of someone else’s ideas to help inspire/shape/transform/challenge our own.
Technology, Entertainment, Design
TED talks are one way to see how leading creators and thinkers view the world as we explore our own thoughts and actions in it.
Here is a talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the state of education and its impact on creativity.
You can find more talks on creativity at the TED website.
Imaginative Habits
Check out this great article on “Five Habits of Highly Imaginative Families” by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers – posted on art page by art educator Erin Patton-McFarren.
Their habits include:
- Creation: Making Things
- Delight: Being Amazed
- Advocacy: Transforming the Odd
- Connection: Cutting a Path
- Respect: Leaving Well Enough Alone
Creative prompt: What habits have you incorporated into your daily life to cultivate the imagination? What are some of the obstacles to creativity? What needs to be added and what needs to be taken away? How can you make more space for serendipity?
Today’s Lesson: Perspective
For the visual artist this could be a simple lesson in vanishing points and horizon lines. How objects look in relation to each other. For a writer a scene is assembled or deconstructed in words. A point of view is taken or exchanged. Past, present and future can meet in an instant. Perspective gives us access to other lives. Empathy becomes our window on the world.
Creative prompt: What are the reference points that guide your imagination? When you look at this picture what is the first observation that you make? What are the sounds that you hear? What does it smell like? What is the temperature? Take a person or object from the scene and give their perspective. Are you early or late for your train?
