Creativity Corner: inspiration and motivation

I hope you were inspired by my last column to create your own creativity challenge. This time,  I want to talk about how to stay inspired and motivated when you’re undertaking your challenge, no matter what it is.

Over the course of the last 40 or so weeks, I’ve had many days when the last thing I’ve felt like doing is making something. As I said last time, part of overcoming this is to tell others what you’re doing. This public accountability will mean you won’t want to fail your challenge.

The other big key to keeping you going is to seek inspiration from all around you – both online and away from your computer – to guide and help you when you’re in a creativity sticky rut.

Online inspiration is everywhere…

You can seek and gather inspiration from all over the world from your computer or phone and this is certainly a valuable way to get ideas. I often use tutorials I’ve seen via blogs and websites for inspiration in my own project.

Pinterest is an excellent way to hunt down inspiring images, as well as collating your own galleries, as you can follow other people’s boards and re-pin their favourites.

A word of caution with using online inspiration. Remember that copying is never cool, unless it’s a tutorial and even then follow the author’s guidelines for using it. Make sure you fully credit any sources you use.

Read all about it…

I love craft books and magazines and I have a huge stash of them. But you could also use design, food and gardening magazines for inspiration – imagine drawing a page full of beautiful spring flowers from a magazine. You could pin up your favourite images on an inspiration board, stick them on your studio wall or save them in a journal.

Snap happy…

Get out and about with your camera (or phone) and take lots of photos of interesting flowers, plants, architecture, graffiti or anything that catches your eye. You can then use them to inspire colour schemes, patterns or full blown pieces of art. Plus it’s good to get some fresh air and away from the empty drawing board.

Sketchy…

I recommend keeping a sketchbook or journal so you can scribble or sketch down ideas and thoughts when they strike you. You can then refer back to it when you just have no idea where to start. I admit to being very bad at this so I’ve just joined an online sketchbook class run by the very talented Alisa Burke to kickstart my sketching journey.

– Christine Evans from 52 crafts in 52 weeks project writes the column Creativity Corner, which appears bi-monthly on Tuesdays. Read more about her on the contributors’ page.