Every day we play with a creative challenge. What we create doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We aim to stretch our creative muscles, be playful, and have fun!
Every day we take a little journey with some unexpected turns. That’s the beauty of creativity. If you just let it, it will fill you with wonder.
The Challenge
Our creative challenge today is made of the following set. If you are familiar with the creomondi building blocks, use the set to explore, imagine, and create. Alternatively, read how we played with it for inspiration first.
The Playground We Will Explore
The Seed We Will Use in our Exploration
And We Are Aiming to Create…
Let’s Play
The random Playground card we’ve picked today sends us to play in An Amusement Park. I prefer to play early in the morning to start the day with some playful creativity, so this Playground imposes a challenge: a trip to an amusement park requires some planning and preparation. Luckily, you can have different kinds of experiences based on each Playground. And so, I decided to explore some amusement parks online.
Initially, I thought of taking a virtual tour in one of the famous theme parks. After watching a couple of videos, I decided to try something else — something simpler — and used a simple image search on the term Amusement Park Rides.
The Playground is only one aspect of our creative exploration. For the creative exploration, we take with us also a Seed (or two). When combined with a Seed, things get new meanings, and some of them become more apparent — these are the ingredients we will later use for inspiration.
The Seed we are using today is Lucid. It’s quite abstract, and I found it hard to use it for associating. So, once again, I tried to look for visual triggers. These are some of the results I got when I’ve used the image search for Lucid (and Lucid art).
Now, with these two unrelated sets of images, I went on my creative exploration. Instead of looking for things connected to the word Lucid, I’ve looked for something I could associate with the Lucid art images I found. Among all the Amusement Park Rides search results, one immediately caught my attention. It was a long-exposure photo of a tilted carousel. The result seemed like a surreal abstract painting.
Would that have been my first visual interpretation of Lucid? Probably not. But the visual trigger from the second search helped me create this surprising connection.
With that discovery in mind, I was ready for the creation step. My task was to create a Photograph inspired by what I found and by the Seed. However, it needn’t necessarily be related to the Playground where I found the inspiration.
I decided to recreate the look of the long exposure carousel, as I found it mesmerizing and captivating. I also knew I wanted to “paint” my photo with intense colors, which I associatively connected with the lucid dreamscape based on the visual search I’ve done.
My first thought was to create an abstract drawing and experiment with photographing it using long exposure. Given the time I planned for the challenge and the lack of adequate equipment, I’ve looked for another alternative. And this is when I remembered the variety of blur filters in Photoshop — most of which I have never tried.
I’ve picked three photos from my archives, two of them from a series called Distant Earth, and one random image I’ve captured during a live music show. After experimenting for no more than five minutes, I found the desired effect after applying the Radial Blur filter. The results were exactly what I had in mind. I was immediately drawn into the surreal lucid scenes I’ve created.
Now, It Is Your Turn…
Don’t follow my steps! Take the set of cards and play with them. Use them as a guide and not as a set of rules. Let your imagination lead the way. Don’t dismiss your ideas.
Have fun! Be creative!