How to Ignite Your Creative Spark
"Encourage your inner artist to come out to play."
How to Get Creative
Look at paintings:
When I view a painting, it does one or two things for me. It either inspires me to paint because it is good and I want to try a similar style, or it annoys me because its so bad or mundane and uninteresting I think I can do better than that. I prefer to look at great paintings rather than mundane or bad paintings because looking at bad paintings makes me think I am better than I really am and it only serves to over inflate my ego.
Looking at great paintings helps me grow.
When I start thinking that I am more special than the next guy because I can paint a pretty picture I pay a visit to a very large art fair and get an eye full of an enormous amount of unbelievable breath-taking art, or I visit a gallery that handles the good stuff, (as opposed to art that looks like paint sloshed onto the canvas blind folded.)
Below are a few exercises to get you started:
Prime the Pump:
One way you can get your creative painting juices warmed up (if you are a painter)is to line up ten small canvases and paint all ten of them at once, one right after the other, and limit the time spent on each one to thirty minutes. Wow is that fun or what! This is an exercise I love. I usually do landscapes or still life paintings, but sometimes I will do a thirty minute portrait so as not to neglect my favorite subject, which is people.
The ugly picture challenge:
Go through some of your photographs and pick the worst or the ugliest one and then see if you can transform it into an interesting painting.
Get on with it:
Line up five small canvases and just apply some background paint without any thought of what you are going to paint in the foreground. If something jumps out at you, or an idea pops up, follow it through.
Just get your paints out and start painting,
Or invite a friend over to paint with you once a week no matter what. You must schedule time for your painting if you are not doing it every day.
