To stay fresh in textile arts, I like to spend time reading about and doing pastel drawings and paintings. This week I have been going through the painting blog of Nancy Reyner who has a wonderful idea for shaking your creativity loose.

“Turn Up the Volume on the Inner Voice
I discovered an easy and surprisingly beneficial painting warm-up exercise. This 20 minute exercise, performed daily for one month (or even less) will do wonders for increasing your creativity, getting rid of artistic blocks, and finding new styles or shifting your work. I came up with this after reading ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg, a popular book for writers to increase their writing and creative abilities. Natalie suggested that writers should ‘clear their head’ by filling notebooks, and write in a stream of consciousness fashion, by writing without thinking, very directly, and not editing. I decided to transform this freestyle writing exercise to something that would work for painters. This is how it works: First get a pile of inexpensive painting surfaces that don’t feel precious to you. I gessoed some scraps of canvas that I had lying around. Gessoed sheets of paper, or cardboard work well too. Just don’t get too small in size. My scraps were actually around 16′ x 20′. The night before you start set everything up for painting so that you can just jump right in without any preparations. Pick a time, preferably first thing in the morning, and stick to a schedule for a length of time. Pick what works for you,perhaps trying one week to see how it goes, but you need at least 5 days in a row to make a good assessment. Make a commitment to acting out your very first thought. Now here is the key. Your first thought is the inner voice. Your second thought is the ‘parent’. We are so accustomed to paying attention to the second voice that the first is sometimes faint and barely there. This exercise will strengthen that first voice, sometimes called the ‘inner child’. I like using the phrase ‘first voice’ better or I feel like I am in therapy.”

Go to her blog and read the full entry. You may recognize yourself in her tale of shaking free. Reyner also has a new book, Acrylic Revolution, which I’ve ordered and am eagerly awaiting the postman’s delivery!

Designer Stefan Mumaw (co-author a book on jumpstarting your creativity, Caffeine for the Creative Mind) created a list of 17 Rules For Designers. This list was originally published in the How Blog. I edited the list down a bit to a few jolts that might inspire the lagging artist:

1. Pay attention to detail and everything that surrounds you.
A designer should have to be able to pay attention to the small details in both design and life. Sometimes the details that most individuals would either overlook or be too lazy to pay attention to will make a project great. Spell check everything, find value in correct punctuation, calibrate your monitors, color-correct images, go to press checks, make sure it works on every browser and every platform, build a mockup, name your layers, organize fonts, call…don’t email, backup your files and stop naming things FINAL. Like insurance, the positive and negative results are usually magnified in crisis. This is true of one’s environment too. Noticing the details of an eroded piece of wood might lead to you using it as a brush or background image in a project that you’re working on. Design is all around us wherever we go (even nature has it’s own design), and being able to pay attention to it often helps in some way or another.

2. Outwardly express your passion.
Passionless design is like a grill with no propane. If you’re not passionate about what you do, your work will show it, your character will show it, your life will show it, so find some charcoal or do something else.

3. Fail triumphantly.
This is stolen from Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” but it’s 100% true. If you’re not willing to go so far out on a limb that you fail miserably, you’re not getting any better. Success may not be at the end of the branch, but anyone and everyone can grab the answers that are around the roots.

4. Know your limitations.
My kids often bite off more than they can chew at dinner and the result is really uncomfortable to watch. It usually involves watery eyes and a fresh napkin. Know what we have the ability to do and where we’ll need help early in the process. There’s nothing wrong with getting help or saying “no.”

8. Remove thy pride.
We pour ourselves into our work, we’re proud of the solutions and ideas we generate, but what separates us is the client. We do this for them, we are communicators first, and as such, we need to be able to put aside our pride for the sake of the client and their wishes/goals/business. It’s completely acceptable and encouraged to defend one’s work, but it’s also equally acceptable and encouraged to be able to remove our own pride from a situation and serve the client.

10. Play.
Ideas don’t always appear when you’re sitting in an expensive business suit and staring at your computer monitor. Put on a Mexican wrestler’s mask, play some office hockey, finally set up and execute that practical joke on the new guy. Sometimes being able to play and laugh releases ideas that are stuck inside your brain. Designers should be curious creatures, and with curiosity comes playfulness. You don’t have to be silly or a jester all day long, but a certain measure of playfulness goes a long way to promoting creative thought and it certainly makes what we do a lot more fun.

13. Never, ever, ever stop learning.
The moment you think you know everything, your learning/growing/executing curve stops right there and you will be doomed to a life of simply repeating what you know. This industry is constantly turning over with new technology, new avenues of communication and new techniques to reach new people. The desire to constantly relearn the technical skills required to execute our ideas is crucial to our future success, but moreover, our desire to improve our ability to generate better ideas and conceptualize stronger solutions is of greater importance. Anyone can use Photoshop. Only you can decide why to use it.

14. Assemble the right group.
Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and truly support your creative endeavors. Don’t under estimate the importance of people who genuinely encourage your passions. You’ll need them. Alot.

15. Look behind everything that is in front of you.
The obvious may be the right answer, but you’ll never know until you’ve looked beyond it to see.

16. Fall in love with the aesthetics of the world.
Typefaces, color, architecture, music, the human body… There are even beautiful curves to emotions and conversations. Pay attention to the beauty in mediums outside of that project on your desk and you might find that inspiration you’re looking for.

Poking around on the internet, I also found a taste of the book itself: three exercises from creativity:
The following three exercises are excerpted from Caffeine for the Creative Mind, by Stefan Mumaw & Wendy Lee Oldfield, published by HOW Design Books:

1. There are signs posted around every office in the world, signs that warn us of impending danger, bathroom segregation, or even which way the exit is. What if those signs were changed to an international pictorial language that not only identifies, but adds art to the space? Forget the shapeless figures and celebrate the difference between men and women, janitors and upper management! Create new signs for:
a) Men’s/Women’s Room
b) Fire Extinguisher
c) Janitor’s Closet
d) Executive Washroom
e) Parking Garage
f) Exit

2. Every one of us has dreamt, at some point in our lives, what it would be like to be rich and famous, living in Beverly Hills, shopping on Rodeo Drive, walking overtly pink poodles with more bling around their neck than the NBA bench-warmer down the street. We’ve imagined what that life of luxury is really like. Oh, the crazy things we would own! Let’s imagine it one more time. Your task is to write down 10 things a single woman living in Beverly Hills would own.

3. Point of view can make the difference between good and great. By looking at problems from another point of view, we often find solutions we’ve never seen before. On a piece of paper, draw nine triangles, all of equal size and composition and equally spaced across the entire paper. Now, interpret those triangles from another point of view by making a drawing using the triangles. Create something out of each triangle that sees it from the point of view of:
a) Mad Scientist
b) Baseball Player
c) Dancer
d) School Bus Driver
e) Mortician
f) Street Cart Hot Dog Vendor
g) Fish
h) Lawyer
i) Zookeeper