Saturday, January 12, 2008

Some attempt at wrapping things up

So what have I learned about creativity? While perhaps not directly related to the blog tasks, I've learned that creativity requires hard work. Both Jolyon Webb and Ben Mathis demonstrated their knowledge of pretty much everything, with special focus on anatomy and traditional drawing techniques. While being good at the area you're being creative in isn't strictly a requirement, having a broad base knowledge can make combinational creativity easier, and is essential for explorational creativity.

At least at the end of all this, I have found a definition of creativity that I agree with.
'Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising and valuable'
Although most of these words need to be further defined, it at least does make immediate sense. It can also be further broken down into types of creativity: combinational, explorational and transformational as explained in my post about the lectures.

I've had a scan back and it seems that a lot of my blog posts end up looking at the idea of process behind creativity. Whether a process is creative or not, (eg cooking) what steps you can add to a process to enhance creativity (like limitations) or even where creativity occurs in a process as mentioned in the lectures.

I do feel like I understand my own creativity a little better. Everything is a process, beginning with a brief with contrainsts.
I don't think creativity is easy, it's something you have to work at. When I do a project for drawing, I don't go with my first idea. For the one day projects and the speed paints I've had to, and I think some of them have been pretty good, but I think they lack the depth of my formal projects. With both the mechanical and the organic projects I had an idea about mid way through which I could have gone with as my final concept. But in both cases either I decided it wasn't good enough, or was frankly told by Chris that it wasn't good enough, so I returned to the drawing board.

I often think about the process of coming up with a character or making your way towards a final outcome. So many ideas are rejected along the way, and a lot of them aren't actually bad, it's just that I decide to go with a different one. How many outcomes would I end up with if I actually went back over a project and followed every variation through?

I think my creativity works because I constantly churn out work. Even if most of it is useless, by the law of averages I'm still likely to find something worth using. Looking back on things, all I seem to do is go one way, find something I like, then go another way, find something else I like, and simply splice the two things together. Unfortunately this process can be a little frustrating while in the midst of it, because it feels like I'm wandering aimlessly until I find the elements I want to staple together.

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