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How I learned to reflect every day, after months of false starts
I love hearing about folks’ creative process/es, and I want to share mine more. Practising.
My creative process is…
- Stopping and starting
- Jumping from drawing on my tablet, to auto-transcribing a vlog, to synching the drawing to the cloud and downloading it to another device so I can upload it to my website
- Surfing waves of creating and getting hit by sneaker waves of executive dysfunction
- Singing one line of a song I love over and over to myself, and then putting it on (and not finding it at first because instead of writing ‘cute screaming’ I write ‘cute jacob’)
- Multivariable
- Evolving, emergent, transformative
- Sprinkled with synchronicities
- Amplify by Steve Pavlina, course, 15 minutes of audio and some homework for each lesson
- The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, book and group
- Voice notes and text messages back and forth with friends
- Watching Adventure Time in the background
Journalling experiments
- Morning pages: 3 (A4) pages of stream of consciousness. I’ve started doing more than 3 pages when I wake up early, so that it evens out when I write less because I’ve woken late. On balance I’m now covering more pages. Awesome!
- Video recordings in the woods, weekly-ish
- Daily drawing: Felt tips on paper during the week and the Procreate app on my iPad at the weekends
- Voice notes on Otter, which does automated transcriptions too
Sat, 13 March 2021 
Sun, 14 March 2021
Visual thinking – a great tool for stellar asynchronous collaboration too
One of the skills I teach people is visual thinking, this includes drawing, but also using images that already exist. Here are some of my favourite resources:
- The Noun Project, a huge icon library. Recently saw their excellent ‘Redefining Women’ icon collection too
- Bigger Picture, in 2020 I learned many of the visual thinking skills that I value so much today
- Start with Everybody can draw this, free and short – 5 videos, totally under 15 minutes
- Highly recommend their Visual Collaboration LIVE course, if you can afford the money and time
- Drawing Together, this is the first Liberating Structure I facilitated at an immersion workshop, co-facilitating with Fisher Qua. Recommend this one as a quick & simple way of representing complexity and nuance
- Pixabay & Pexels for free stock photos. I use these as a quick way of adding visuals, to add some variety and depth alongside icons.
- Nappy, Create Her Stock, Eye for Ebony – I’d forgotten about these ones that centre Black people
- For more like them, check out these lists by Comfy Girl With Curls, Lyrical Host, Jeda Pearl,
- Some others include Unsplash, Public Domain Pictures, Raw Pixel, Burst, Dreamstime
- Bikablo is good too, and got me well on the way on my journey with drawing in 2019, but I find Bigger Picture more valuable and versatile
Intrapreneur & freelance skills
Storytelling, a tale of obsession
I’m extremely fascinated by storytelling lately. It started when it unexpectedly popped up in a position of prominence in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.