Creative Exercise

This week marks the beginning of a new category in the Creatively blog: creative exercise prompts to refresh yourself and help you get unstuck. They are random and designed to get your creative juices flowing and start producing work.  Creative energy isn’t constant and one of the best ways to reignite is to be productive and prolific.

For this exercise, there are three aspects- you can choose to use one, two or all of them in your work.  Make as many pieces as you can exploring the prompt.

Aspect one: Make a self portrait using symbols to represent yourself. Include at least four characteristics of yourself in your work.

Aspect two: Make your work a painting and limit yourself to making only 100 brushstrokes to complete your piece. 

Aspect three: Make your work only using your favorite color. You can use different hues, saturation’s, values but all of the same color.  Try at the end incorporating a color you usually don’t like. 

When you are finished, write about the process.  This will be a free write: put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and just begin writing.  Fill a page with your reflections about the exercise. 

Alternative: if you are a musician or a writer, edit the exercise in a way similar to this:

Aspect one: Write or play a song/poem/piece as a reflective self portrait. Allude to at least four characteristics of yourself in your work.

Aspect two: Make your work using only 100 notes/words

Aspect three: Make your work using only your favorite music/writing style. You can Explore the style any way you would like within the genre. Try at the end incorporating a style you usually don’t like

When you are finished, choose a different creative approach to explore your experience (eg if you are a writer, draw or make music, if you are a musician, write or draw, etc)