Thursday, August 9, 2012

My Creative Space

This week for My Creative Space, Kootoyoo set a challenge in order to keep things fresh.

Challenge 1 | My top tip for staying creative

My top tip for staying creative is to journal every day. If I don't sketch for a few days in a row, then it's so much harder to get back into it, to get back to my craft desk and just unleash some creative energy. But sometimes it's hard to doodle every day - some days I just don't feel inspired. For those days, I turn to some of my "prepared" pages.

A prepared page isn't as complicated as it sounds. I talked about it last week, actually, but it's worth repeating.

Whenever I find myself painting, there's usually some leftover. Instead of washing it down the drain or letting it harden on my palette, I take that paint and spread it onto a blank journal page (in one of my many sketchbooks). Once dry, I close my sketchbook up for one of those "need to do something but don't know what" days.

Whether it's a thick coat of a single colour:

A quick wash of watercolour:

A mix of a few colours:

Or just a few splotches:

Having something already on that page makes the inspiration flow that much easier.

As you can see from these pages, staying creative by journaling every day isn't about complex, highly polished pages. Sometimes it's only a matter of a quick doodle or a few layers of tape. You can also see that writing out a single word, playing with typography, is another way I get pen to paper.
Anything is better than nothing!

How do you stay creative?
Head on over here for more tips!

3 comments:

Angie said...

Nice set of pages! I have really been enjoying using various tapes lately too!

Claire said...

Hey Amanda, have found this post really interesting. I'm not into journaling but do doodle in a book and just wondered about preparing pages, so this has answered some of my questions. Thanks.......
Our creative tips are quite similar......

Claire :}

Camilla said...

Yes that's a really helpful tip. When the creative juices aren't flowing there's nothing more intimidating than a blank slate!