Non Bead Tools for Creativity
Wednesday June 20, 2007
Do you need ideas for keeping track of your ideas? Here are some Non Bead Tools for Creativity to help enliven your creative process. Using these tips will also help enhance your basic color, line and texture skills, or at least help your ability to see these important aspects of an image.
Think of a board on the side of a barn. If you photograph it, you will get the image, the way the sunlight shades certain areas and exposes others, how the rough wood shows its texture in the image and the color of the wood and whether or not is has been painted recently. But, what if you don't have a camera handy? Or, what if you want more detail than you'll get from them pixels, such as other things going on - background noise, the sky, fragrances, animals close by but unseen. These are some of the things that can later bring an otherwise non-descript image right back to life.
By not taking a few minutes to write down some of those visual, olfactory and tactile impressions you get from the overall scene, you may easily forget the fragrance of hay mixed with oiled leather, and how and how when the breeze blows, the whole area smells sort of like an oatmeal cookie. You may also miss the way to boards seem to sort of bulge outward about chest-high warps in the middle, as though something large had spent a lot of time leaning against that wall from the inside, and how that has stretched the wood a little, giving a certain ripple to the grain that the camera might not capture. Maybe you won't notice the intricate and lively little spider's web near the bottom of the plank, with the multiple carcasses of the bugs it has helped keep away from the livestock.
Yes, these are little things, and they may or may not have anything to do with the way you choose to use this impression in your beadwork later. Maybe you only wanted an image of the paint color, to see if you can find it in a certain type of bead. Perhaps you wanted the slant of the light on the wood, to integrate into a certain texture in a pattern you've been considering.
I know time is short in all of our lives, and I know that in most cases, a picture will cover all bases, sort of. In the article, I offer an example of my own, about how my time spent examining a little spot that caught my attention has managed to stay with me in detail for a long time, even though I've not had the chance to work the project it inspired. I will though, because even if it is 10 years from now, I have my written description, and, consequently, my mental image of what I saw, so I know I could replicate it or represent it in a project. That's the value of journaling the things that really catch your eye.
Think of a board on the side of a barn. If you photograph it, you will get the image, the way the sunlight shades certain areas and exposes others, how the rough wood shows its texture in the image and the color of the wood and whether or not is has been painted recently. But, what if you don't have a camera handy? Or, what if you want more detail than you'll get from them pixels, such as other things going on - background noise, the sky, fragrances, animals close by but unseen. These are some of the things that can later bring an otherwise non-descript image right back to life.
By not taking a few minutes to write down some of those visual, olfactory and tactile impressions you get from the overall scene, you may easily forget the fragrance of hay mixed with oiled leather, and how and how when the breeze blows, the whole area smells sort of like an oatmeal cookie. You may also miss the way to boards seem to sort of bulge outward about chest-high warps in the middle, as though something large had spent a lot of time leaning against that wall from the inside, and how that has stretched the wood a little, giving a certain ripple to the grain that the camera might not capture. Maybe you won't notice the intricate and lively little spider's web near the bottom of the plank, with the multiple carcasses of the bugs it has helped keep away from the livestock.
Yes, these are little things, and they may or may not have anything to do with the way you choose to use this impression in your beadwork later. Maybe you only wanted an image of the paint color, to see if you can find it in a certain type of bead. Perhaps you wanted the slant of the light on the wood, to integrate into a certain texture in a pattern you've been considering.
I know time is short in all of our lives, and I know that in most cases, a picture will cover all bases, sort of. In the article, I offer an example of my own, about how my time spent examining a little spot that caught my attention has managed to stay with me in detail for a long time, even though I've not had the chance to work the project it inspired. I will though, because even if it is 10 years from now, I have my written description, and, consequently, my mental image of what I saw, so I know I could replicate it or represent it in a project. That's the value of journaling the things that really catch your eye.
Comments
I can totally relate to what you are saying. There is a house with amazing landscaping in the front yard. The colors are beautiful. There are purples and yellows and oranges. When creating jewelry pieces sometimes using colors together like that don’t come to mind. The orange in with the purple, in my opinion, was just stunning. I find myself wanting to takp a picture and then sketch the scene to capture all of it. I too have a notepad I keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas and designs.