c u r i o u s w e a v e r » Where are those creative Juices?

Feb 27 2008

Where are those creative Juices?

Published by curiousweaver at 5:27 pm under Design, Drawing & Art

This is one of those books that you read then carry around with you everywhere. You do the exercises, then do them again you get inspired, get ideas…get all the creative juices going.

Finding Your Own Visual Language is a magnificent book. After reading this book and other similar ones this week I’ve learnt four valuable things.

1. Don’t TRY to be original.
2. Accept that some work will have a lot of time and effort put into it but still may not work.
3. Einstein said "in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity".
4. Creative block may just be an important, if not essential, aspect of the creative process. Work with it.

This design book is created by Committed to Cloth artists Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn and Art Cloth Studio artist Jane Dunnewold. Its raison d’etre stems from textiles. Although it illustrates quilting, printed cloth and tapestry weaving more directly it will give huge inspiration to all other weave textile artists too. It’s about getting ideas going, continuing to work and relating those ideas or even just concepts to your practice.

Sixteen very easy to approach visual exercises form the ‘Getting Started’ section of the book to set the maker on a path of artistic and personal discovery. The exercises allow any type of imagery but provides practical ways of breaking down those fixed ideas that lock our brains down and make us unable to continue. These are followed by how to ‘move forward’, examine your progress then going deeper into finding your own visual style or language. I’d give this book 11 out of 10. (I’m not one to reserve the best mark for something else that may come along!- life is short.)

The book is beautifully presented, with illustration and lovely paper and has a spiral binding. I usually don’t like spiral bindings, although I always appreciate the way they lay open so flat, but this one is enclosed within the cover which is neater and more durable.

I thought you might like to see my first attempts at working with one of the exercises. This is visual exercise 2 "30 Days of Cutting Stamps". I bought some very cheap PVC erasers and started carving them into designs for stamping. I used lino cut tools but any blade would also work.

The designs were instant and easy to fill a page and experiment. I’m going to use this design as a basis for peg plan art in a twill weave.

This is another simple design.

This is Visual Exercise 1 "Splitting Shapes". I used black paper to draw, cut then split shapes. When happy with the arrangemnent I glued them into position. A very simple exercise which starts the ‘what if I did this or that’ in your head.

This is the same shape which I scanned into Photoshop, cleaned up then imported into Illustrator. There I was able to trace each path individually and colour them. This is only the start. (Sorry, the book doesn’t go into how to do all this)

4 responses so far

4 Responses to “Where are those creative Juices?”

# Tauereton 27 Feb 2008 at 9:55 pm

thanks for the review, I will look fwd to reading this book!
# textillianon 28 Feb 2008 at 3:19 am

I have to do some searching for that book. (Amazon US doesn’t have it.)

The four things you have listed are so true and took me so long to even begin to learn.
# Trish Goodfieldon 28 Feb 2008 at 6:28 am

Hi Karen

This is link to Makiko Tada’s new exhibiton

http://picasaweb.google.com/Makikokumihimo/2008MakikoExhibition?authkey=ic1w3qy3Dw4
# Meg in Nelsonon 02 Mar 2008 at 9:27 am

Lynne alerted me to this particular post. Neither Amazon in UK nor US have this book at the moment, so I look forward to seeing more of the exercises you’ll be doing.

And I’m happy to read that you’ve enjoyed the opening of the exhibition, too.