Archive for the ‘creative process’ Category

One of my graphic design profs in college had us keep a graphic design “sketchbook”. She had a series of assignments involving type, photography, collage, and other visual experimentation. It was a fantastic ongoing assignment that really forced visual play, a concept necessary to healthy creative flow.

I found this in a shoebox this weekend. It’s a collage/drawing I kept from my sketchbook that semester.

House Party!

This father’s day my mom bought me the Legend of Zelda at a flea market. Zelda was one of my favorite games growing up, and I loved playing it again on my old NES.

Naturally I searched for maps online, and there are plenty. But I was disappointed — the first map I saw had every secret, every level, every door… OK, I know that’s what a map is for, but I immediately realized it took the fun out of the game. The process is half the fun – more than half. Add my natural fascination with maps, diagrams and information design, and you get this. I realize it grades me as a Class A nerd, but I don’t care.

No one I’ve shown it to has been particularly interested (not good criteria for a blog post, right?), but then I ask, “Did you play Zelda much?” The answer is inevitably “no”.

I’m pretty sure as a kid I had a map some friend tore out of Nintendo Power. I didn’t know what I was missing.

Open Mic Sketch #2

An “artist date” is one of the tools I incorporated into my creative process after reading The Artist’s Way, probably the definitive creative process how-to book. The Artist’s Way is worth it’s own post another time, suffice to say it recommends the artist date as a weekly (if only…) discipline. Artist date criteria:

1. Spend a minimum of two hours
2. Do something you actually enjoy and want to do
3. It must be disconnected from any of your normal obligations

On Thursday I walked into downtown Ferndale for open mic night at AJ’s Cafe. Sometimes drawing is too stressful to count as an artist date for me — it feels too tied to work. But on this night I really felt like drawing, and the 1/2 mile or so walk into downtown was lovely in the crisp final throes of winter.

Most of the sketches really weren’t good enough to show, but that’s not the point of an artist date anyway. This one turned out pretty well. The guy was a perfect subject — he barely moved once he started playing.