The Creativity Faucet August 21, 2020 12:49

 

How does your creativity flow? Are you a steady drip of creativity? A flood? Does it come and go depending on what you have going on in your life?

I find I ride a rollercoaster of inconsistency with my creativity. When I'm in a stable routine, my creativity floods out. When I'm in the throes of change (hello moving 11 times in 10 years), my creativity slows to a trickle and sometimes just dries up. I recently switched my day job which included a commute that motivated me to get up at Stupid:30 a.m. so I could avoid the worst of the traffic and the commute wouldn't be as onerous. Adjusting to that new schedule sapped all of my energy.

Now under the coronavirus, work-from-home (i.e. a much shorter commute), and voluntarily continuing to quarantine to slow the spread, my creative floodgates are wide open again. And a lot of it is to keep my thumbs off scrolling the news which spikes my anxiety and stress. So, I have personal reading habits and virtual socialization that help me manage my anxiety among other activities. And for keeping busy, creativity fills a significant gap. 

All of the work in this photo collage is produced using the ProCreate app on my iPad with an Apple Pencil. Oh. My. This app is UH-MAY-ZING!!!! It's like real paper but without the clutter of paper. I can draw to my hearts content. And then I can go down rabbit holes and play with different versions of the same thing by making a copy of the layer or the whole file and then go down another tangent of coloring or filling things in. I took a short class to learn how to use ProCreate and Illustrator better and another class to learn the basics of hand lettering. I've made:

  • Surface pattern designs for Spoonflower
  • Then made clipping masks of the surface pattern designs into shapes like the dolphin, manatee and sea turtle which in turn make cool prints
  • I did some layering in ProCreate and then clipping masks in Illustrator to create the little beach houses
  • And then I went down the hand lettering path and am totally loving this

All of these things will eventually show up in my shop as prints. I'm figuring out how to harness the creativity with my art business being a part time job and treating it as such. That part is a work in progress!