Your Creative ToolBox
Originally published at Lane Ellen. You can comment here or there.
What’s in it? What works for you for generating ideas?
What works for you for creatively rendering those ideas into hard media instead of residing in your head?
A popular source for creative ideas is The Artist’s Way (and the follow up book, Vein of Gold) by Julia Cameron. It is a book recommended by several bellydance training programs, as many artistic people find that it is a method that works for them. Another book that I’ve come across is Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. I’ve read the Twyla Tharp one, and I’ve never successfully gotten all the way through Julia Cameron’s books. I own Flow and am trying to read it now…
What I’m trying to get at here is that I’m not looking for books on creativity. I’m looking for the practical, active tips for how you make your internal ideas come out and take form. How you take a feeling and communicate it into the substance of art - whether through words or color or movement?
When you feel filled with the desire to create, burgeoning with the need to put pen to paper, how to do you open yourself up to set it free?
How do you find inspiration? How do you keep it fresh, instead of creating a variation of the same thing?
How do you keep in touch with the creative spark to fill you when you are tired and don’t have anything new?
Do you have exercises, hints, activities? Do you listen to music? Do you do something rote to clear away the chaff? Julia Cameron would say write your Morning pages to get all the extraneous “stuff” out and stop blocking your flow. Twyla Tharp says to exercise and move.
What do you say?
What works for you and your art?