More Creativity Warm-Ups

How are you doing on your intentions for the new year so far? I know it's only January 4 and we just finished the last of the cranberry sauce last night, but so far so good. I'm glad to making short creativity warm-ups a mindful part of my day again.

Here's what I did yesterday. I've seen this exercise before, but was reminded of it in Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists. Bascially, you make some quick scribbles on  page then add features to those scribbles.

Come on, you know you can do it! You've been finding faces in clouds since you were a kid. Give it a try, and leave a comment to tell me what you got. I'm calling mine "Dragon defies holiday pounds" and "Not A Snob."

Added after lunch: Remind me how many repetitions it takes before a new habit takes hold? I forgot to add the email subscription info again again this morning.

And for periodic news about upcoming classes and eCourses, shows, creativity exercises, and a few fun freebies, please use the form below to subscribe to my email list. I promise not to share your address or litter your inbox with too-frequent mailings.

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Sketchy Ideas for 2013

It's a new year, and many of us are starting it resolved to make our creativity practice both meaningful and mindful. I don't know about you, but I don't have this mapped out in project management software. I just plan to chip away at it day by day. Here's how I started today:

I made a quick sketch from a photo.

It's a shot Bill took yesterday on our New Year's walk along the Wolf River near our home. It was just a little slippery under the snow, so I handed the camera to him and concentrated on my footing.

I snapped a digital photo of my sketch so I could upload it to this post. That photo was dark, though, so I opened Gimp to lighten it. While it was open, I figured I might as well label the odd scribble in the lower left. That fallen leaf is one of my favorite parts of the image, but I might not remember that from just looking at the sketch. Labeling isn't cheating -- it's expanding on the sketch to flesh out an idea.

Then I remembered my intention to consistently watermark images I post online this year. So I set up a Gimp brush I can use for that. I stamped it in the lower right corner. Gimp imaging is part of what I teach in my Digital Fabric workshops. FYI, registration is now open for that class at the Midwest Weavers Conference in Emporia, Kansas in June.

I'll come back to this sketch another day. For now, it's time for me to move on with other tasks. I have orders to get in the mail, and I need to send out orientation materials for students registered for the Cross-Knit Looping eCourse that begins January 15. There's still some room in the class, if you're looking for a jump-start for your 2013.

Got a favorite creativity exercise? Hit the Comments link below this post and tell us about it!

added 10 minutes later: My other resolution was to add a link to the bottom of posts reminding readers about my email mailing list sign up option.  Will try to get it right the first time ... next time.

New Year's Resolution

Resolution #1: I've let my regular practice of creativity exercises lapse. The result feels like mental bloating similar to the physical effects of my culinary indulgences over the holidays. The treats are mostly gone and won't be replaced. I'm putting creativity exercises at the top of the to-do list for much of January. I'll post some of mine here, and hope you'll share your ideas as well.

Resolution Number 2:



Your comments on my last post helped me decide: We all have a stake in saying how we want to connect and learn online. So yes, I'll post some of my work in the upcoming class on e-learning and digital cultures here in 2013. And I look forward to your comments on those posts, too.

What are your resolutions?

Shifting Gears With Creativity Warm-Ups

Sometimes, shifting gears in the studio goes smoothly and you purr along from one thing to the next. Other times, it feels like going from a 1-speed bike with coaster brakes to an 10-speed, and shifting too tentatively on a steep incline. I had to get off and push for a while last week. More about that in a moment.

Chain Reaction fabric design by Donna Kallner on Spoonflower

But first, another bike moment: For the current Spoonflower bicycle fabric challenge, I "built" a Rube Goldberg style machine that uses a tandem bicycle in a steampunk "alternative power generation" device for an imaginary "reanimation experiment." You can't see it from this swatch, but click the image and change the view to 1 yard to see how the repeat forms a chain design. Voting for bicycle fabrics is open through Tuesday. It's always fun to see how so many different ways designers approach a theme, and I love the limited palette challenges (this one is three colors).

Back to that hill, and shifting gears. Every time I think it would be nice to coast for a while, I make some hairbrained decision that leads me to a torturous uphill climb followed by a terrifying downhill race to the finish. And I love it! But as any real cyclist would say, it all works best when you're warmed up and have your head in the game. To do that in the studio, I get serious about my creativity warm-ups.

Donna Kallner creativity exercise -- double doodle with watercolor crayons and water fingerpainting

Most of my warm-ups don't take long. In about 5 minutes, I can do a double doodle (a Sharpie in each hand), add color with watercolor crayons, then fingerpaint with water. It doesn't need to "be" anything -- it's just a readiness ritual that gets me feeling creative and productive.

Donna Kallner creativity exercise -- fabric collage from the Black Hole

But sometimes, I need a bigger boost. That's when I reach for my Black Hole, the small bin of fabric scraps I keep for quick creativity exercises. In this case, "quick" means an hour or two, tops.

Last week when I got stalled on that hill, I did what I normally do: I struggled and wasted a lot of energy. Once that was out of the way, I gave myself permission to rethink the route. After about 90 minutes of free-motion doodling on scraps of fabric, I rethought where I wanted to go with my project and started over. It wasn't all coasting from there.
Usually there are still big hills to tackle on the alternate route, but I enjoy those as long as I've got a little momentum.

What do you do to gain some momentum? And what do you do with stuff like this fabric doodle, after it's served its main purpose?

Silly String Doodles And Digital Fabric Design

Are you feeling the need to shake things up a little at this point in the winter? I had one of those tired-of-gray days earlier this week, so I treated myself to a can of party string. It's less than the cost of a coffee shop beverage, has no calories, makes me smile, and was the source for this new fabric design.

Silly Billy Goats Gruff fabric by Donna Kallner on Spoonflower

Here's how I made it.

First, I shot the string on the snow out behind Bill's shop. Then I shot the string doodles with my digital camera set on its highest resolution. Later, when I opened this image in Gimp, what jumped out at me was the goat in the center. Excuse this small inside joke for the students from my 2011 Digital Fabric class at Sievers. Quoi avec Donna et les chèvres? D'abord la chèvre est dans le jardin, maintenant, elle les voit dans la chaîne de Silly. Temps pour le chocolat!

The goat was more clear after I desaturated the image and adjusted the brightness and contrast.

I cropped the goat element from the larger image...

... cleaned up the distracting bits...

... drew in some horns, a bell and some snacky flowers...

...and set up a seamless repeat pattern. I added a couple more elements to finish it off:

These clumps of grass, drawn with the wacom tablet, are from the doodle exercises I posted daily on my Facebook page during the month of December.

The color blocks were filled from a palette I made using the Copaso color tool on colourlovers.com, where I'm donnastitches. 

In the screen capture above, on the left is a photo I took of some hand-painted fabric in my studio. To make a digital palette from a photo, I upload it to Copaso and click on different parts of the image. On the right, notice the text values under the color chooser sliders? Those are color codes. I copy the HEX or RGB values into a New Palette in Gimp. Palettes are very useful when building digital fabric collections. My goal is to build about 30 limited-color palettes over the next month or so. I'm posting some of the palettes on my Facebook page, some are just going into Gimp. Wilbur, the Gimp mascot, is happy.

If you're looking for another way to use Silly String for a winter creativity boost, here's a post I wrote a couple of years ago.

So what do you do when you need to shake things up a little? I hope you'll share in the comments section below or on Facebook!

The DDQCH Creativity Warm-Up

Since the last holiday gift was wrapped, I've been wrapped up in production and beta testing for my first eCourse -- New Age Looping Basics. There hasn't been much going on here to entertain or inspire you. So I'm revisiting some creativity exercises originally published on my old blog, Compost and Creativity, and getting back on a program of short warm-ups and creativity rituals at the beginning of the day instead of just the doodling I do in the evening.

The DDQCH is a doodle/collage hybrid. Here's how it goes:

1. Double Doodle. Spend a minute or two double-doodling on a large sheet of paper (I use recycled blueprints or sheets of newspaper). Double-doodling is done with a marker held in each hand. I use two different colors. Try to vary your movements so one hand does not always mirror the other, and so that your hands sometimes cross the center line of your body.
2. Quick Collage. After doodling, do a quick collage on the paper. I keep a stack of pages torn from magazines for this purpose. Just grab a few sheets from the pile, pick a couple, tear them into pieces, and start gluing them down with a glue stick. Remember, this is just a warm-up exercise so don’t overthink it or try to make it “be” anything. Set a timer, if necessary, to limit yourself to about 5 minutes for this part of the warm-up. Try to do it standing up, if possible, so you keep your body moving.
3. Harvest A Crop. After gluing down collage elements, it's time to see what you can harvest from this exercise. You’ll need a cropping tool, which you can make from two L-shaped pieces of white poster board. Move the cropping tool around on the collage. Things will look very different within that white frame. Select something, cut it out, and glue the crop in your sketchbook. 

I generally follow this warm-up with a few minutes of writing about whatver I’m working on or whatever else is banging around in my head. By the time I’m done, the studio has warmed up, my tea has cooled enough to drink, and I’m ready to focus and be productive.

How does that feel to you, doodling with both hands?

Rewind And Fast Forward

from Lesson 3 of the New Age Looping Basics eCourse with Donna Kallner

So much of my time lately has been focused on production and testing of the New Age Looping Basics eCourse that other things, well.... Let's just say it's time for some housecleaning. Since you can't see my shower but you can see this blog, I started cleaning here first. And then it turned into a rewind.

I'm rewinding back to a traditional blog format. I liked the appearance in Dynamic Views, but functionally it just wasn't working. So we're back to something I hope will work better for you than having to make a visual scan of pictures and the first few sentences of a post to find what you want. In other words, the right-hand column list of categories is back, and I've added a search box that should work more than 10 percent of the time.

I've updated my Workshops page to let you know where I'm teaching this year. I think there are a still a couple of spaces in the Willow Spirit Constructed Vessels workshop at the Willow Gathering in Decorah in June. Maybe I'll see you there! And 2012 Sievers class registrations opened yesterday, so maybe I'll see you in Digital Fabric or Local Color.

This blog housecleaning project isn't quite complete (when are they ever?). I still plan to clean up the overflowing Pages (the bar under the header). So I'll be reprinting here some of the creativity exercises that first appeared on my old blog, Compost and Creativity. That way they'll appear in searches and categories here. No, you're not losing your mind if you think, "Haven't I read that before?" But it feels like a good time to revisit those creativity exercises and rituals, and to share a few new ones.

In the meantime, which mode are you in right now -- rewind or fast forward?

Do You Play-Doh?

How do you get going on a blah day? You know I'm a big believer in the practical magic of creativity warm-ups and readiness rituals. Lately, I've been doing Sharpie doodles in an old book while the tea kettle boils. But some days you need to pull out the big guns.

The other day, I made lines and dots from Play-Doh, then spent a few minutes rearranging those elements and photographing each arrangement.

The first dozen or so were simple geometric designs.

Then things got more interesting.

I ended up with a couple of designs I really liked.

This one, I took over to Aviary to apply a Polaroid effect. I altered that a bit more in Gimp, set up a repeat, and uploaded it to Spoonflower.

See the design on Spoonflower.

I can't wait to see it in my next batch of fabric proof swatches!

Even though it's seldom my intention to "make" something from a creativity warm-up, sometimes I can't help myself. What about you? Are your favorite designs planned or do they reveal themselves while you're doing something else?

Cut That Out Creativity Warm-Up

Part of the value of a creativity ritual is not having to think about the ritual itself. You know what's expected, and you do it. I can do the Simple Shapes collage warm-up day after day after day and get the desired results. But then, I'm also happy eating peanut butter toast for breakfast every morning.

You might want a bit more variety. So for your benefit (not because I was stalling the other morning), here's a riff on Simple Shapes I call Cut That Out. You'll need:

• a timer
• a magazine from the recycle bin
• scissors
• glue stick
• sketch book

Here's what you do.

Time. Set the timer for 6 minutes.

Rip. Tear out the first page from the magazine where there's a large shape with a fairly well defined outline. This sample used the left side of a two-page spread showing a woman in a polka-dot dress.

Cut. Following that outline, cut out the shape.

Hack. Hack toward the center of the shape and cut out a circle (or other simple shape of your choice). Quickly cut the rest of the shape into three pieces.

Rearrange. Working quickly, make as many different arrangements as you can using the circle and the three other pieces deconstructed from the shape you cut out. I find it helps to give myself prompts like, "dancing animal", "mythical creature" or "alien landscape." Spend about 5 minutes making different arrangements.

Poodle Polka

Glue. When the timer goes off, glue your final arrangement into your sketch book.

Name it. Give this composition a name or title.

Cheats. Use fewer than the four pieces you cut out, if you like.

Running Basket

Or allow yourself to add one element to complete your final composition.

Derby Day -- Headless

Derby Day -- With Head

You can even cheat an take a quick digital photo of any arrangement that strikes your fancy (applique design? digital fabric? transfer element?...). But then keep moving the pieces around until the timer goes off.

Remember: The point is not to create the most beautiful composition ever made with four pieces of scrap paper. It's to see how many compositions you can come up with in a short time. Do it, then move on to your other work, secure in the knowledge that you can play the game again tomorrow.

Breathing & Movement Warm-Ups Video

Last spring, I posted instructions on my other blog for one of the movements I got a ballroom full of people to do before my keynote address at the Missouri Art Education Association conference.

This week, I wanted to offer an expanded resource to those who attend my Creativity PhD lecture in Moorhead, Minnesota. So I've posted a short video on breathing and movement warm-ups on my You Tube Channel.

I almost didn't post it because it's so rough. But I'm trying to practice what I preach: Strive for fluency, but don't wait for perfection.

Next Stop -- The Textile Center

Marge Dancing by Donna Kallner

Still floating on the fun of my week taking a spinning class at Sievers, I'm feeling pretty light on my feet as I prepare for upcoming classes at The Textile Center. This Minneapolis venue is one of my favorite places to teach. It's always exciting to see the work students do there.

This time I'm teaching Breaking Boundaries, a two-day class built around guided exercises and creativity catalysts. We'll be playing with the picture plane and frames that are part of the story, ways to add actual and perceived dimension to image elements, and ideas for using layers, sheers and shadows. I'm adding a new element to the class with layered image transfers. It's part of a unit I was planning to propose for Bead & Button 2011. Since Bead & Button's dates overlap the Surface Design Association biennial conference next year, and SDA is in Minneapolis, and my elaborate plan to be in two places at one time involved tearing a hole in the space-time continuum... well, I didn't propose to B&B. Layered transfers fit perfectly with the goals and objectives of this Breaking Boundaries class, so these students will get a little bonus.

I'm also teaching Photo Cabochons, a fun one-day class where students learn to create focal elements for jewelry from family photos, clip art, digital photographs and other image elements. This one, made on a slice of hardwood dowel, is from a photo of my dad as a boy.

This one, made on a resin bead, is from the photo my mom had made for my dad to carry when he left for the Army.

The Photo Cabochons class is Friday, September 17. Breaking Boundaries is September 18-19. Yep -- that's just over a week from now, so if you're planning to register please phone the Textile Center asap.

Speaking of registrations, I realize I'm planning to go the The Gathering at Sievers, but I haven't actually registered for it. Oops -- gotta go make a phone call.

Moonshine & Mother's Day -- Part 2

Last week I showed you an intoxicating creativity exercise I'm calling Bootleg Collage. And while playing with scissors and glue and the contents of your recycle bin is plenty rewarding all by itself, I promised you more. So just in time to make a special Mother's Day gift, here's how to transform a collage into a small piece of wearable art. (My mom is still on dial-up so I don't think she'll see this providing her friends don't forward it to her -- please!)

What You Need

• Inkjet silk
• Cotton batting
• Stiffener (like quilter's template plastic)
• Ultrasuede for backing
• Embroidery floss
• Embroidery needle
• Bar pin back
• Size 11 seed beads
• Nymo D beading thread
• Size 10 sharps needle

Print & Prepare The Fabric

1. Scan your collage.
2. Open a blank document and insert the collage image and any other images you want to print on a sheet of inkjet fabric, leaving about a 1-inch border all the way around each image. 
3. Print the document on inkjet silk according to the manufacturer's instructions. Let dry overnight before peeling the fabric from the carrier paper. 
4. Briefly soak the printed fabric in a basin of cool water with a drop of Palmolive or other mild soap to remove any unbonded ink, stubborn bits of the paper or starch used to adhere the carrier paper to the silk. Rinse, dry, and iron if necessary. OK, this sounds like a big deal but it only takes a few minutes, and if you've printed a bunch of images on the same sheet of inkjet fabric you get them all done at once.

Embellish The Image

• Cut a piece of cotton quilt batting larger than the image area. If you're not comfortable just holding it in place while you embroider, quickly baste it to the back of the printed silk.
• Embellish and border the image with some simple embroidery stitches. I used embroidery floss I painted earlier with Dye-na-Flow fabric paint.

Assemble The Pin

• Trim the excess batting.
• Cut a piece of stiffener (quilting template or recycled plastic) slightly smaller than the image area. 
• Place the inkjet fabric face-down, then top the batting with stiffener.
• Imagine you’re about to wrap a gift with the fabric. Trim the fabric, if necessary, so you have a small overlap when you fold the fabric on two opposite sides around the stiffener. Press the folds with your fingers. Make a few stitches on the back to hold those opposite sides in place. On the other two ends, trim the excess fabric and fold it like wrapping paper. Press the folds with your fingers and fold the ends to the back. Stitch to secure. Stitch a bar pin back in place.
• Cut a piece of Ultrasuede to cover the back. Cut two small slits in the Ultrasuede and position it over the catch and the arm of the pin back, covering the bar. You can stitch the Ultrasuede backing to the piece as you bead the edges.

Bead The Edges

• Anchor a thread and pick up two beads. Take a small stitch one bead width away through the fabric and the Ultrasuede backing. Pass the needle back up through the last bead strung. Pick up one bead, make a stitch, and pass through that bead again. Repeat the pattern. 
• When you get all the way around, pass through the first bead again, pass back through an adjacent bead and secure the tail with a couple of small stitches.

 There you have it:

• a simple gift that will fit in the palm of your mother's hand
• a gift that will spark conversations when she wears it (My daughter made this for me..) 
• an opportunity to use a creativity exercise in a project, and
• an opportunity to learn some new techniques.

I do hope you'll give the collage exercise a try, and let me know how you like it. But if you're running short on time (Mother's Day is May 9), you have permission to use my red flower collage for your own personal use.  Just right-click on the image to save it to your computer. (My mom -- the retired schoolteacher -- won't mind a bit.)

Moonshine & Mother's Day -- Part 1

A few years ago, my parents were getting ready to move to a smaller place. Worried about space and storage, my mom said, "You don't need to give us gifts any more." Well, you know that didn't fly. But then she said, "Well, how about only things that would fit in the palm of my hand?" That request has been a wonderful inspiration to me. I make her jewelry. She wears it out and about. People comment. It starts conversations. And it doesn't have to be dusted. Perfect.

(Mom, if you're reading this, stop now or be prepared to develop another case of gift amnesia.)

Very often I use gifts I make to work out ideas for classes or to sample new techniques. So for Mother's Day, I'm planning to make Mom a pin based on a collage exercise I'm developing. I'll share the exercise in this post, and show how to make the pin next week.

Bootleg Collage.
Picture the Dukes of Hazard racing down a country road with a trunk full of hooch: That's the speed I'm shooting for with this exercise in abstracting and distilling an object -- in this case, a flower. Here's what you need for this exercise:

• A magazine from the recycle bin
• Scissors
• Glue Stick
• White paper
• 15 minutes

Quickly find a page in the magazine that has a lot of color. (Actually, I used part of a page left over from doing the Farmville Collage Exercise I wrote about on Compost And Creativity this week.)

Cut out a circle for the center of the flower and glue it to the white paper. Now stop for a moment to think about a flower -- say, a chrysanthemum (sticking with the Mother's Day theme). Think about mums and peonies and other flowers with lots of petals. Petals. That's what we're going for here.

Working out from that center circle, start cutting petals freehand with the scissors (no drawing first) and placing them so that there's white space showing between them. (Don't glue them down just yet.) Work quickly and don't try to make the petals perfectly shaped or all the same size. Stay loose and keep adding petals.

Stop when you have a few rounds of petals or your 15 minutes is up, and glue down the petals. If you like, cut a couple of leaves and glue those down, or throw down some scraps to suggest other flowers.

At least half the class, at this point, would be looking at their neighbor's work and thinking, "Wow, theirs is great and mine doesn't look like a flower at all." So humor me here. Prop up your collage, walk across the room, and look at it again. Now take the collage into the bathroom, hold it up to the mirror, and look not at the collage but at the reflection of the collage. Better?

At this point, you might be thinking, "Hmmm, what else can I distill by this method?" Pretty intoxicating, isn't it?

Next week, I'll show you how to turn your flower collage into a simple gift that will fit in the palm of your mother's hand.

Doodling With Willow

TGIF. Picture me patting myself on the back (we'll call that stretching), and knocking back a couple of aspirin. This week my to-do list got shorter and the pile of harvested and sorted willow got deeper. The reward for all this industry is giving myself some time to doodle with willow just for fun.

The material I use for doodling comes from the pile of branchy and really curvy stuff I keep off to the side as I sort the harvest. When I need a break from other tasks, I grab pieces from that pile and start bending simple frames that I secure with electrical cable ties and hang in the window to dry. With a dry frame, it's easier to hold a shape and avoid kinks. This trick, along with most of what I know about willow, I learned from Jo Campbell-Amsler, who taught the first class I ever took at Sievers back in, I think, 1994. 

I'll talk more about how I use the dry frames in my willow trellises in my next post. Today is about doodling.

In willow doodling, I'm not trying to make anything specific. I just pick up a branchy piece of willow and start going over/under/over/under. I may bind pieces together or spread things apart and add ribs to support more weaving. If things kink, no big deal: I'm using willow from the junk pile.

 
Sure, this looks like a leaf to you. But the way it landed when I tossed it on the table looked like a shapely leg. I'll make another one later and play around with some ideas for the rest of the parts for a two-dimensional zaftig lady trellis. Think of this as Frankentrellising. It's how I come up with things like the willow witch and her withie familiar who haunt my studio at Halloween.

Really, the process is no different that what an embroiderer does with a doodle cloth, or what a surface designer does with a scrap of fabric used for cleaning brushes, or what a quilter does with scraps cut off while squaring up... Shall I go on?

Willow isn't my primary material. Hasn't been for a long time. But I have enough fluency with the material and techniques that I can doodle without overthinking. There isn't a "value" associated with what I make with willow. My trellises go outside. Birds sit on them, and what happens next is as good a cure for perfectionism as anything. What also happens is I start to see connections between my willow doodles and my other work. Really, couldn't I translate that leaf/leg into needleweaving?

Creativity researchers call this divergent thinking. Having a label for it doesn't make willow doodling any less fun.

So what's your go-to fiber for doodling?