Fresh Fast Creative Ideas 2

Think Again!

Last week I posted two ideas for daily creative exercises. Here are two more.

The first is a brainstorming method that asks you to relate unrelated things. If you have a deck of cards, you can use it with my starter lists below. You can also randomly think of your cards before you check the list, and of course, you can modify or make your own lists! 

Choose one red and one black card. Find the two corresponding things from the columns below and think of a potential product or possible creation that combines them. Any idea is a good idea. Quantity is more important than quality or feasibility. Keep writing things down even if they’re silly or nonsensical. Especially if they’re silly or nonsensical. Try to think of 10 ideas, and then pause.

Now think of three more. It should take you about ten minutes total. The intent is to work quickly and without censoring. After several days, you might find you can generate more ideas in the same amount of time, and maybe one of them will be brilliant—or at least eye-rollingly funny. Regardless, getting your mind in a creative state will be a healthy warm up for other work.

Hearts or Diamonds

A clock tower 2 vending machine 3 bird’s nest 4 parking meter 5 dart game 6 store mannequin 7 constellation 8 kite 9 coffee maker 10 luggage J volcano Q fish tank K piñata

Spades or Clubs

A cactus 2 jellyfish 3 bubble gum 4 stapler 5 mushroom 6 confetti 7 candle 8 rabbit 9 pumpkin 10 salad J human foot Q swim fins K broom

The science: In 1938, Alex Faickney Osborn came up with what he called “organized ideation” and his advertising coworkers later called “brainstorm sessions.” Two of the key components of a successful session were producing as many ideas as possible and deferring judgement. He later wrote a book called “Applied Imagination” (which is currently pretty pricey on Amazon).

Stanford professor Tina Seelig has studied creativity for years as part of Stanford’s design school. You can see several of her talks about brainstorming online, including this two-minute interview with toy designer and IDEO executive Brendan Boyle about how to brainstorm better.

Shape Shifters

If you have a set of Tangram shapes, you’re ready to go. If not, they’re available online here to print and cut. I used two sets.

First find a random noun. You can a) choose a playing card and use the list above; b) use an online random item generator (there’s one here); or c) open a book and put your finger on a page. The closest noun is your word. 

I tried the third method for the images here. The first word I pointed at was “city.” The second, below, was “telephone.” Arrange the tiles to represent the noun. There are no judges, so use your imagination and simply assemble something. Give yourself five minutes, tops.

Sometimes playing with blocks or clay can free your mind in ways that using pencils or paintbrushes cannot. Note: Feel free not to use all of the shapes, or to stack them on top of each other. Using all of them every time might be too limiting!

The science: This activity forces you into constraints. Studies have proven that narrowing a problem produces more, and more creative, results than a wide open question. In fact, it’s so widely accepted that studies to find exactly how much constraint is ideal are ongoing. In 2017, Balder Onarheim and Michael Mose Biskjaer of Denmark started looking into what they call the “sweet spot.” They say this is “where the creative practitioner can be said to experience the ‘right’ level of ‘constrainedness’ conducive to optimum creative performance.” There’s a link to their research here. 

That’s all for now. I’d be happy to hear how these or the previous two ideas work for you. Cheers!

I’ve experimented by publishing the last two posts as articles on Medium. You can find them here.

Fresh Fast Creative Practices

Creativity is not basketball. 

Yes, to maintain your skills, art requires practice, but the creative version of throwing free throws day after day isn’t going to facilitate innovative new thinking. 

I’ve designed four fast and easy exercises that you can do every day. I’ll post two today and two next week. Please adopt one or more of them if they work for you. All the ideas are based on scientific research, and I’ll talk about that at the end of each section. 

Caffeinate Your Art

Here’s an exercise to do in the morning because, chances are, you’ve got the materials at hand.

Take a napkin, piece of scrap paper, newspaper, or the inside of your cereal box. Drip, blow, spatter or pour some dribbles of coffee onto it. If you want to make darker marks, use the dregs from your coffee filter or mix a bit of water in used grounds. Let the spatters dry as you finish your breakfast.

Spend at least a couple of minutes studying your coffee stain. Turn it around and look at it from several angles. Think about the negative (white) spaces. Let the shapes guide your imagination. When an image calls to you, add detail with a black felt-tip pen to make the splot into a character or scene. If you don’t like the outcome, it’s no big deal. You can make another tomorrow.

The science: The coffee drip exercise is based on the fact that play increases our creative output by lowering tension and the stress of performance. Experimenting in a child-like way can free your hand to come up with unexpected things. Letting go or being loose is another way to think of it:

“I found I could make some internal act while darning my stocking, an act of detachment by which I stood aside from my hand, did not interfere with it, but left it to put in the needle by itself. At first I found great difficulty in restraining my head from trying to do my hand’s work for it, but whenever I succeeded the results startled me; for at once there came a sense of ease and I was able to work at maximum speed without any effort.” 

Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own

You can find other reinforcements of the benefits of play in these two TED talks. Janet Echelman on “Taking Imagination Seriously” from 2011 and Tim Brown of Ideo on “Tales of Creativity and Play” (it’s an old one, from 2008).

Try Tracing

Years ago, I drew the same tree every day for a month. I used different mediums and styles every day and really got to know each limb. One day, I put tracing paper on top of a photograph of the tree and drew (see photo). I never would have guessed how much I learned from that exercise. Try it! Choose something you want to draw, maybe something you’d be afraid to draw freehand. Put tracing paper on top and copy the image outright.

Here’s the trick: You aren’t actually plagiarizing, because even when you trace, you make a lot of decisions, and every artist will choose differently. How much detail are you going to include? When you omit details, how will you draw around them? Will you make some marks darker or wider? What is the quality of your line? 

As a side benefit, you may learn about proportions and perspective and angles, because you have to pay attention to every pencil stroke. It just may give you some tricks to use the next time you’re not tracing.

The science: A Japanese study from 2004, “How Copying Artwork Affects Students’ Artistic Creativity” by Kentaro Ishibashi and Takeshi Okada found that “drawings by subjects who previously had copied others’ drawings were rated more creative than the drawings of subjects who had not copied. … It seemed that copying enabled them to generate new drawing ideas.”

Austin Kleon (Steal Like An Artist) says great artists collect other artists’ work because “every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.”