Whether building websites or making artwork, it always amazes me what can inspire greatness. The colors of a piece of fabric can suddenly lead to a modern looking website, the eyes of a thrift store find can solve how to fashion eyes for your latest creation, or maybe you see something and think – hmm, that gives me an idea.
If you’re like me; you ponder the possibilities, walk away, and promptly forget the inspiration and the item that created it.
In the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new craft projects website called The Crafty Tipster. While I am constantly looking for new ideas, I have never really done my creating with the idea of sharing the process with others.
With Christmas in mind, most of my ideas cover Santa’s, snowmen, reindeer, penguins (they seem to now be used extensively in decorations), and all the other great things one makes for gifts. Knowing that my drawing skills are so poor that my illustrations require subtitles, I started looking at all of the great ideas that land on my doorstep each morning – the newspaper!
Now as I go through the advertising circulars, I do so with scissors and glue stick in hand and some old card stock I had leftover from resume printing. Snip, snip, oh there’s an idea. Ooh look, I would have never put those colors together! Hmm, fat body, little head – that’s cute. As I sit with my morning tea, it’s actually become fun to scour the printed materials that come into our home for inspiration for both website building and crafting.
Strangely enough, I never liked paper dolls, construction paper art, or any of those other things so many girls play with growing up – I was into running, jumping, and making mud pies :). Now, for some reason I’m interested in those pursuits. But, the years have also given me the wisdom to see how inspiration only works if the ideas are retained and what better way to do so then to create my own personal book of inspiration!
So, what are your secrets to remember something that gets your creative ideas flowing?