From the desk of Artistic Amanda…

A few of my past blogs have contained excerpts from Caffeine for the Creative Mind by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield. I’m a huge fan of this book as it delivers on its promise of waking up your brain and training you to think outside the box – something we, as designers, should include as part of our daily creative maintenance.

Now the caffeinated duo has done it again with their book Caffeine for the Creative Team: 200 Exercises to Energize Your Next Brainstorm. And thanks to HOW Design, they have made it easy to jolt the creativity of your next brainstorming session with these downloadable cards… enjoy!

I read something interesting once that compared the creative job to running a marathon. It’s difficult to generate ideas, the article pointed out. But you get better by training for it. If you were going to run a marathon in two months, you would prepare, wouldn’t you? You would train for that event; you would set a schedule of activities that would prepare your body for what would be asked of it on that day, because you knew that day would arrive. What if you had to prepare for a marathon but you didn’t know what day it would start? Enter in the comparison. We’ll work with a new client someday. They will come to us as creative professionals and we’ll need to bring our “A” game. Preparing our bodies to endure physical activity is just like preparing our minds for creative activity.

All that to say, creative exercises are pretty important. Today, I woke up my brain with this one:

Most of us are familiar with the Swiss Army Knife, that clever gadget that houses 276 tools in one handy red plastic sheath. As creatives, we may never have a glaring need for a 2″ hack saw, but there are things that we use every day in our professional life that might make more useful tools. Your task is to invent your “Professional Survival Swiss Army… Thing. Draw it on a piece of paper or simply list the items it would have.” (excerpt from Caffeine for the Creative Mind by Stefan Mumaw & Wendy Lee Oldfield)

Here are the specs for my Swiss Army…Thing! What are yours?

• automatic coffee maker, complete with mug
• a compartment with art supplies which include (but are not limited to) freshly sharpened pencils with large erasers, magic markers, acrylic paint, rubber cement, and paper clips
• tape measure
• a laser that would beam me across town for fast travel
• a button allowing me internet/email/calendar access that also told me the time while playing the itunes playlist of my choice
• scissors
• digital camera
• scanner
• cat treats

These two made me include the last one.

The wonderful thing about being an artist, is that you can find inspiration just about anywhere: colors, words, books, nature, music… I had a friend in college who wrote one of her best songs (for a school assignment, no less!) based off the Gustav Klimt painting, The Kiss.

I recently bought a book by Jim Krause called “Creative Sparks: An index of 150+ concepts, images and exercises to ignite your design ingenuity” — for those days (like today) when it’s 25 degrees outside and you don’t want to venture outside to find inspiration. Today, I cracked the spine of the book and landed on a page with this creative exercise:

MAKE FACES.

No other subject has received as much attention from artists than the human face. The language of the face is the most cross-cultural of all human languages and its dialects are endless. Don’t you think you should spend some time learning “face speak?”

Try this: using the tool of your choice (pen, pencil, mouse, stick) draw 9 faces within roughly the same “style.” Work fast, strive for variety within the unity of the style. Next time, try another style or continue in the same vein. Do this anytime you find yourself with a few minutes without something better to do.

Work in ink, pencil, paint and electronic media. Work with paper, pixels, chalk and anything else that can leave a mark. Notice how different media force different solutions. How far would your artistic and communicative abilities progress if you drew a thousand faces during the next year?

Interesting. I’ve never given much thought to faces being a language, but Krause is completely correct in saying that emotions can be read in any language. Below are my six faces. [I ran out of time and room!] What faces can you come up with?

"Make Faces" creative exercise.