How tapping into your hidden creative streak can help you!
Stuck in a rut? Having trouble finding solutions to your problems? I highly recommend tapping into your creativity. The best thing is… you don’t have to be a wannabe Van Gough for this to work!
I have been a doodler as long as I can remember. School lessons or work meetings that got boring? You would find me doodling. I wouldn’t say I’m naturally gifted at drawing, but forever, I have found inner peace when I am being creative.
Last year, my brain was quite fried after a very intense strategic contract, a dose of covid and a general anaesthesia (which unfortunately always seems to mess with my brain). I decided to take some time out to be creative. I started by teaching myself to do ink and watercolour together. After a lot of practice, I actually amazed myself at what I managed to create. And I say this with no arrogance - I am well aware that I’m not in the league of talented artists, but by my standards, it was a small achievement! I even made a few cards for friends who thought they were bought from a shop! Well, that was nice. Or maybe they were being polite. It doesn’t really matter as I never create for praise!
I then started to write a children’s book. I had an idea and belted out 1000 words quite quickly. I shared it with a friend, and she said that it was great, but would be better for slightly older children as an early chapter book. So, I then began the challenge of writing the additional 11,000 plus words! Some days, I really did have writer’s block. So, what did I do? I found an online app called Fresco and decided to teach myself to use that. It’s an amazing creativity tool that you use with a digital pen – you can turn that into all sorts of markers, paint brushes, colours etc. to create artwork. It’s amazing (once you get the hang of it – I’ll save my frustrations for another post!). So, I started digitally doodling. I found that if I did this for ten minutes or so, my brain refocussed and suddenly I was back in the creative writing zone. Fabulous!
I finished my book and the same friends who had kindly praised my watercolour cards insisted that I illustrate my book myself. At first, I was like “NO WAY!” but they kept on trying to convince me. I have a streak where I feel like if I am producing a piece of work that ultimately might be for someone else (e.g. paying for my book), then it needs to be perfect. I had to have a stern word with myself about this. I flicked through a few David Walliams and Roald Dahl books (which I love) and looked at the illustrations. They are generally messy and amazing, but not exactly “perfect”. Ultimately, I think children just like a picture to look at, and if they can identify what it is supposed to be, I don’t think they mind whether it’s “perfect”. Also, who is to judge what is perfect? I’ve seen extremely expensive pieces in galleries, and, in my opinion, I wouldn’t put them up on my wall if you paid me! Try telling that to the person buying them for $millions!
So, I spent many hours creating the illustrations for my book. It was very frustrating at times, but guess what? It was all I could think about. My brain couldn’t worry about anything else once I was in the zone! It was MARVELLOUS!
Zoom forward to March of this year. I had a very unfortunate accident and ended up having another surgery… and yet another anaesthetic to mess with my grey matter. This time it was worse – my leg was in a non-weightbearing cast AND I lost my voice for 8 weeks! AND I got covid again. AND this set of circumstances took away the ability to do the very things that normally keep me sane – walking the dog, swims in the sea, sitting at the beach, easily going for coffee with friends. I couldn’t walk, talk, or swim!! I couldn’t even focus on reading a book. The anaesthesia gave me terrible memory loss for a while, so I would forget what I had done the day before – that included any chapter of a book I might have read.
So, what did I do? I am lucky to have a great mobile phone with a digital pen. I loaded the Sketchbook app to my phone and learnt to use that. I am useless at drawing people, but I became obsessed with creating people every day. I gave them different hair styles, eye and skin colours, make up, outfits, personas and names. I went from being thoroughly fed up to getting excited about what person to create next. I was laughing to myself about my own drawings. I was so focused on them that the time would just drift away. When I look back at the first ones I drew, they were pretty terrible to be honest! However, it was highly entertaining for me, and I even started to get requests from friends for me to do my caricature of them! I look back at those illustrations and I can see that they did get better over time, but the best thing of all was the joy that the process gave me! I drew ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-EIGHT pictures! Crazy. I’ll share some here to brighten up this post. Have a giggle if you like!
Anyway, if you are feeling lost, stressed, bored or anything in-between, I highly recommend finding something creative to do. Do it for yourself. It’s fun, cheap and who knows, your next scribble could be worth a million one day!
