the challenge
I am playing with the Owl Seed today, looking for a creative insight around me. It’s raining outside, so my creative exploration is limited to home.
my insight
I was looking around me when I saw my phone’s wireless charger standing on my desk. It was most likely the Seed that triggered my brain to come up with the idea to duplicate it so it might look the eyes of an owl. So I did.
I placed the charger on a yellow paper, took its photo and duplicated it. Without planning this in advance, the lighting created an effect that resembled a beak, that added the final touch to my home-made owl.
reflection
The constraint I was subjected to today resulted from an external force: the weather. And with that came a discovery, as often happens, and a new dimension to play with: post-processing.
All the visual Insights in the past six weeks were either ready-made (which in this context means not staged) or based on something I physically created. But today, I took the liberty to do a simple manipulation on the photo I took by duplicating it.
Remember the phrase Anything goes? Well, this is another instance of the same concept. As long as there’s no explicit constraint, we are allowed to do anything in the creative process.
And this idea is not limited to our artificial creative challenges designed for practice. The same applies to real-world challenges. We are often so blinded by what we should not do, or what we explicitly must do, that we forget that we can do so many other things simply because no one said we can’t.
Often, realizing this, identifying these strange things we can do, and actually doing them, will lead to a creative breakthrough.
mental notes
- Creative breakthroughs are often derived from realizing there are surprising things we can do just because no one said we can’t.
now it is your turn… be creative!