Mental Gymnastics

I originally started this blog with the idea of testing what changing my thinking about my art making process might do to actually getting some art done. I think I have made some progress, but like anything, it takes practice. After reassessing what my mind set has been lately, I thought I could use a mini-workshop to get back on track.

I had purchased a set of cards called the "Creative Whack Pack" a few years ago. These were the invention of Roger Von Oech who is an author of several creativity books. The deck consists of 64 cards with each card having a different creativity strategy. There are four, sixteen card suits: Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior. These represent four types of thinking involved in the creative process.

Anyway, I decided to get these cards out and try one of the suggested exercises to determine what type of creative style I have. My strongest suit turned out to be "Judge", which is evaluating an idea and deciding what to do with it. The next was "Warrior", this is the action suit for implementing ideas. (I thought that was good). "Explorer",which is for discovering resources to create new ideas and "Artist", transforming resources into new ideas were my least used strategies. No wonder I feel like my thinking is a bit stale! Obviously, all these strategies are good in their own way, but I can definitely see that I need to balance them out more evenly.

Now I am randomly choosing a card per day and applying that strategy to my day. So far, "Loosen Up" and "Asking, What IF?" were the most interesting and helpful. The "Experiment" is back on track!

Jeff's Corner: Suit yourself!