We’re thinking about all things floral this month and using flowers as our starting point of inspiration to get creative.
We’ll be working through our creative framework:
Gathering Inspiration:
Pulling together images, words, textures, colours, ideas all related to flowers. Seeing everything that inspires us all in one collected place really helps us see ways we can follow our interests and get creative.
Seeing things differently:
We start looking around us and seeing how things in our everyday world could relate to flowers in some way.
Working with materials and making:
Getting our hands into it, trying different things out, making proof of concepts, testing how different things look or work and refining our project as we go.
Showcasing our work:
This can be so many different things, and of course depends somewhat on what we’ve been working on. Perhaps it will be a simple case of photographing it and sharing on social, perhaps hanging on our wall at home, perhaps tucking away in a sketch book.
Get stuck in, be inspired by flowers and let your inspiration guide you into making something creative!
You can follow along with us on our instagram feed and we’ll be sharing what we’re up to here as well!
Well, this is exciting! We’re happy to tell you that we’re evolving and adjusting and morphing into something new! Building on our ideas about how EVERYONE is creative, we just need to let go of our ideas about perfection & comparison & find our own unique way of making. We’re going to do this through our podcast chats, including interviews with creative folks about their creative process; blog posts of course; upcoming online courses; AND each month we’re going to give ourselves and YOU a creative prompt, that we will then work through each week with you, breaking down the creative process each week and digging in to all aspects. Do we know exactly what we’re doing? Heck, NO! But, we’re having a ball while we do it! This month we’ll be introducing the steps we take to work on creative ideas, and giving real world examples of them. Then we start on our first creative prompt in May, each week using our creative framework to explore ideas and hopefully inspire you as we all work on our own unique creative project.
Em and Jess chat about their collaborative sketchbook project and ways that you can work on a collaborative creative project, including ways that aren’t drawing/painting.
There are SO many great books out there that can inspire us to think and live more creatively. Here are three of our current favourites, definitely worth adding to your gift wish list this holiday!
Every Tool’s a Hammer, by Adam Savage
Chances are, you know Adam from his long stint hosting the TV show Mythbusters, where every episode was an exercise in thinking outside the box. In this book, Adam gives not only a look back on his journey as a creative and a maker, but also some really good solid tips and thoughts on organizing your creative ideas, how to attack projects and how to create your own tool kit, whatever that may look like for you.
Conscious Creativity, by Philippa Stanton
Philippa Stanton, otherwise known as 5ftinf on social media, gives us a very unique view on looking at the world through a creative viewpoint, guiding you through ways to see what’s around you in a different light. Philippa has Synesthesia, meaning her senses overlap, so sights become sounds for example, and this wonderful ability helps her to encourage others to look deeper at everyday items to see , feel, hear and sense more.
How to be an explorer of the world, by Keri Smith
Keri Smith is, quite simply, awesome! This book is made to be used in the very real sense as a guidebook and museum of your experiences. This will bring out the kid in you that collected interesting stones or snail shells and wanted to put them together into your own mini exhibit! Keri creates space for you to explore, document and analyze whatever excites you in your surroundings. This book is a must read!
We haven’t linked these books up to any of the major retailers ( you know who we mean) because we want to encourage you to find them at your local indie bookseller if you are able- support small business!
Creativity and problem solving are the lifeblood of every invention, art, business and adventure that humanity has ever undertaken. In my work with children I have a unique vantage point to observe the earliest development of creativity in each child I care for. But in recent years there has been a startling decline in the ability of each cohort of children to be creative. This is an actively researched statistic, measured as ‘creativity quotient’, and research shows that each decade children are measurably less able to creatively solve problems. ‘Standardized intelligence’ scores are rising over the same period, also demonstrating that academic performance is not the same skill as creativity. Dr. Kim of the College of William and Mary has done years of research that demonstrates a clear pattern of decline AND that decline worsens more quickly each decade as well.
The long term effect of this decline becomes magnified- less creative employees, fewer entrepreneurs, less interest in the arts, lowered participation in activities that benefit mental health, which results in a decline in mental health, business systems become less efficient as people stop using innovative thinking, the fall out is endless.
Infants show creative problem solving skills emerging from a very young age. The need to explore objects, people, and their environment means they begin learning how to manipulate things very quickly (haptics). Babies have to decide how to get from one place to another, reach a toy they can see, communicate a need without words – all forms of creative problem solving. As children grow they start to really branch out; climb on counters, swing from branches, stack logs, throw balls, rocks and other objects. They don’t do these actions randomly. Each one has a purpose; if I throw this rock, will it come down here or there? How fast? How hard? Will it break? Will it bounce? The children are attempting to classify their world, and test these theorems regularly and extremely creatively when given space, time and freedom to do so, But society in North America is becoming far more restrained. In general terms we are governed more by fear than say, thirty years ago. Children live in a world where playgrounds must be ‘safe’, school yards should be as flat and grassy as possible to allow for sports, trees shouldn’t really exist in school and definitely not bushland or ‘gasp’ open water!
Somewhere in the past we have begun to slide towards valuing total safety, behavioural conformity and academic intelligence over risk, creativity and assertive behaviour. Risk, creativity and assertiveness are very tricky to promote in group care models, and the larger the group- say at school- the harder it becomes to promote them. Some of the most widely respected (and creative) education models in the world are also models that are considered ‘exceptions’; charter schools, forest schools, Reggio programs, Waldorf and nature based programs. Educators everywhere sigh with jealousy when talking about such innovative programming as New Zealand’s Te Whariki or Australia’s newer mixed age group ‘facilitated learning’ schools- but the North American system still remains mostly unchanged from the 1950s.
Somewhere between kindergarten (which in Canada can be as young as 3 and 8 months old) and the end of high school the majority of children begin to believe such things as ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not artistic’, ‘I am not a creator’ ‘I can’t solve that problem’. Creative arts in grade school becomes a half hour lesson once per week, taught by a teacher who has a math or english degree and a teaching certificate. Problem solving becomes formulaic, applied under certain situations to certain subjects. Even those who are creative are told to have ‘an alternate plan’ for a ‘real job’ after school. Children who are creative in school become labelled and grouped (drama student, art student, music student) as if being creative is not a valued skill in engineering, business, science and mathematics.
One of the most basic reasons that we are less creative today is that the building blocks of creativity are not present in our lives anymore. Children require specific types of input to their brains in order to develop the neural pathways needed to creatively solve problems. Take tree climbing. Do you recall climbing trees? Think about modern children’s opportunities for that now- accessibility, safety concerns, municipal code, child protective services, social views and a litigation minded society, all have a role in ending the likelihood that a child will climb a tree. Yet the action of climbing, specifically a living tree, has immense neurological and developmental impacts on the brain. The decision making process involved in moving your body to find a support is complex, requires vestibular, proprioceptive, touch, hearing and logic processing to achieve. As you move from branch to branch your body is processing more data than at any other time due to the complexities of movement and placement plus sensory input plus environmental and weather information, measuring strength in the various branches, thinking about the path up and back down again. In childhood you have more neural connections than at any other time in your life. As we stop ‘using’ them, they become pruned away, by limiting the types of input we provide we get stronger skills in some areas, but fewer in others. EVERY child has the ability to be creative, but only those in environments that promote and support creativity will continue to be that creative. The others will begin to believe they are not creative. These and other basic building blocks of ensuring a creative brain are being eroded faster than we can make adjustments. From the rise of cell phones, to safety concerns to fears of being labelled a bad parent or worse, having your child removed because you ‘endangered them’; the freedom to explore and create is being largely curtailed.
In essence the journey from childhood to young adulthood is fraught with many dangers…none so great as the loss of your creativity. It IS still there, dormant and slumbering. You have neuroplasticity to thank for that (another blog for another time). You CAN reconnect with your creative self; not by following a step by step how to video on Youtube (although it will help you produce a perfectly lovely piece of something), but by engaging with your inner child. Play, exploration and letting go of fear are the keys to true creativity. Let’s explore them together!
