This post was originally written on September 5th, 2009. While some of the statments about a) working, b) being creatively drained and c) drawing lately aren’t completley true or relevant now, it’s still a good reminder for me to get the pens out and draw- after all, you can’t release your creativity too much, can you?
I come from a creative family. My childhood involved a lot of painting (on paper, ourselves, and the veranda), dress-ups, collage, and projects with boxes. We had a box in the cupboard which was always full of old cereal boxes, egg cartons, toilet rolls and other handy bits like ribbon and paint. Each christmas we’d make things to decorate the house, and at the start of the year we’d make covers for our books.
Despite all this creativity, I was never good at drawing. I still did it though. Sometimes. But Rhys was the drawer. In fact, I think he was generally considered to be the creative one even though we all had our creative quirks.
I’ve always liked art. Painting mostly, and now I’m also into ‘crafts’- which is good, because I can learn so much of that from Nanna. It’s been a while since I painted. Despite the encouragement from my husband- I just haven’t had time. When I finish work I want to crash, not be creative and alive. Lets face it, being creative makes you alive. At least it does for me.
A few months ago I realised I’ve been feeling more then a little creatively drained. I can’t think of anything in particular that has drained me, but I think that exhaustion/busy-ness is what’s stopped the creativity flow through me. I was feeling dead. In the last few weeks though, I’ve been slowly, slowly increasing my creative levels, and in the process, my happiness. I’ve done this through drawing. :-O
I’m not a particularly good drawer. I can see things, and put them onto paper, which I guess is drawing… But I’m best at copying. So what I’ve been doing, is forcing myself, every 1-2 days to draw/copy something.
Sometimes I scan the inter-webs for cute pictures, and I copy them. They’re still a little bit of me- and I get comfortable with the way pictures work, and I trust myself to draw cute things. The first time I did it, the other week, it was the most amazingly crazy experience. As in, my world was thrown upside down and my brain was going crazy- like it hadn’t in so long. I may have been drawing things that other people had thought of, but I was still utalising that Right side of my brain!! It was indescribably. I guess (I don’t know) it would be something like being high… My work was spinning, and there were colours everywhere, and the words people said were beautiful typography… oh wait, that’s just normal life…
The point of all this is to say, if you’re feeling a little creatively drained, then pick up a pen, draw some squiggles (even if they’re of nothing), and let the creativity flow!
