the challenge
The creative task I did yesterday started with three Seeds, which inspired three Insights, which in turn helped me write a short story. Compared to that, my challenge for today is super-simple: a creative exploration based on a single Seed: the Pastel Seed.
But this does not mean that this challenge will not be meaningful or effective. So my personal take-off on this simple task is to find Insights with more than meets the eye.
my insight
These are the two Insights I found this morning. I captured both on the same street, and I am posting them together on purpose. I want to explore them further and reflect on them together.
I won’t tell you what these objects are. I deliberately zoomed in and avoided taking a wider angle photo. Why? because I wanted these Insights to become somewhat surreal — like a strange landscape you can walk in.
So before we reflect on the Insights, let’s stare at them for a minute or two — let yourself drown into each of them. Imagine…
reflection
My personal association when looking at the first Insight is that of a desert. It looks like an endless landscape on a different planet craving for water. The sense of surrealism is created first because this fragment is detached from its context. We don’t really know what we are looking at. But this feeling gets even stronger because the association clashes with the colors: it looks like a desert, but the color is the color of the sky. Which immediately creates a new and even more surreal story: the sky is broken.
Note how nothing from this line of thought is related to the Seed I started with. The Seed was just the trigger to look around me and find this interesting Insight. I could have stopped with that, but I decided to have a deeper look at the Insight. I decided to explore it — to play with it. It’s an exploration by itself and it makes this experience more surprising and more effective in terms of developing our creativity.
The second Insight is not less interesting. The pink wall caught my attention first thanks to the Pastel Seed. But instead of taking a random photo of this wall, I looked closer to find the most interesting fragment in it. And I just love the result.
The texture of the surface is amazing. Again, it looks like the surface of a distant planet captured from above (mental note: these space associations are probably derived from yesterday’s entry). But then, out of nowhere, a non-natural perfect shape with strong colors and cryptic 3D pattern appears. You might say this brings the photo back to reality. But in my mind this detail just makes the photo more surreal.
I also notice how this strange object is the complete opposite of what I was seeking to capture initially. My task was to capture an Insight inspired by Pastel, and somehow the first thing you see looking at this photo is the strong, vivid red and yellow stripes — nothing even remotely pastel. And this tension makes the Insight even more interesting.
mental notes
- Don’t settle with capturing Insights — reflect on them and use them as a playground for further exploration.
now it is your turn… be creative!