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 Also Add a Constraint
Let’s Play
Today, we start our game in a great Playground: A Museum. Before you dismiss that as an unfeasible idea due to scheduling constraints, consider this: you don’t have to physically visit a museum to explore one. There are numerous resources online that can help you explore standalone artworks or an artist’s body of work. The best way to play in the Museum Playground if you can’t visit a physical museum, though, is to take one of the many museum virtual tours available online. And that’s exactly how I played today.
So, in the first part of the game, I picked a random exhibition to explore and took the Flood Seed with me. The exhibition I visited was a retrospective of the Korean artist Yoo Youngkuk. I have to admit, haven’t heard about this artist before today. There was nothing in picking the exhibition that was affected by the Seed or the goal of the challenge we are playing with.
As always, the goal of the creative exploration step is to tune into a concrete discovery — something inspired by or associatively connected to the Seed. As I explored the virtual exhibition, I came across this close-up of a painting called Mountain. The blue stripes associatively reminded me of a flooded beach, and so I took a screenshot of this discovery and continued exploring the artworks.
The second part of our game is focused on creating something while using whatever we discovered as inspiration. Our goal today is to create a short story. We can use the Seed as inspiration as well, but as you will see, I was focused on the fragment of the painting I found. I took it out of context, ignoring the title of the artwork and the story behind it, and let my imagination drift freely and lead the way until I had an idea for a short story. At that point, I also considered the Constraint card, which is part of the playing set we are using today. As often happens, the constraint — the absence of the primary subject — actually helped me focus on the essence of my idea.
Here’s the short story I wrote.
She drowned in the blue color, trying to imagine it was the sky. Frozen in her windowless room, she saw clouds crossing the narrow stripe of color, birds flying to a warmer land, and an occasional airplane with people on their way to their vacation or back home.
Home.
Tomorrow, it will be one year since she saw the real sky. Or is it one month? Or a decade? Back then, she didn’t realize how much she would miss it.
Her eyes drifted to the green area. At least they were kind enough not to leave the concrete walls in their unnatural color.
She saw a huge tree. Its leaves created a green ocean. She could feel the wind playing with them, animating them. The tree surrounded her, slowly covering her imaginary sky. It wasn’t just any tree. She knew that. It was the last of its kind. The last of any kind. Just like she was.
Before I hand this challenge to you, it is important to remember again that we are not aiming to create a masterpiece. The story I wrote might not qualify as a good short story. Just like going to the gym, our goal in this play is to stretch our creative muscle. To imagine and create something for the sake of creating, and not necessarily to write a state of the art story. So, don’t censor yourself or think you are not up to it. Just have fun!
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!
References