Mysterious Flame

Today as I was reviewing my RSS feeds, I came across a post on Freelance Folder that talks about different idea seeds that can later bloom into full-fledged blog posts. These same idea seeds can germinate into things other than blog posts, of course, such as painting or photography ideas, or other written forms. As always, be sure to capture and document these idea seeds in some form, whether it’s on ordinary 3 x 5 cards like Anne Lamott does, or if it’s in a special Moleskine notebook you have.

See also: Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity and A Few Inspiration Sources, Culled from photopreneur.com

Michael Shane Neal is an amazing and prolific artist and a fantastic guy. If you ever meet him, you’ll find him to be extremely personable and gregarious. He’s received many honors and accolades. In the midst of teaching numerous workshops and painting many commissioned works and going on plein aire painting trips, he finds time to write on his new blog, The Spectator.

In two recent posts (Tips on Survival! and Tips on Survival 2, Neal shared some tips for survival he mentioned in an article he wrote for a newsletter for the Portrait Society of America a few years ago. While all ten tips are pretty important, I’ll highlight/paraphrase/condense most of them (since I don’t wanna copy him outright):

• Set goals and write them down! List things you would like to accomplish both in the short term and in the long term. … Setting goals is the first step to accomplishing them. Hang them near your easel as a constant reminder of what you will achieve.
• Work hard. Whether you have the opportunity to devote your entire day, or just a portion of the day to your art, work hard! I have worked 12-18 hours a day for more than 15 years. It is important to devote as much time as possible to your growth as an artist, but you must work smart as well. An hour of painting free from distraction is worth 3 when the phone is ringing and the kids are home from school.
• Study. Spend quality time developing your skills by reading and studying each day.
• Tenacity! Don’t take “NO” for an answer! … Commit yourself to growth from every experience. Remind yourself constantly that you will succeed, that you will grow as an artist, and your decision to follow your dreams to become an artist will become or remain a reality.
• Thrift. For nearly the first 10 years of my life as a full time artist I painted every painting on a $2 easel bought second hand, mostly held together by duct tape and a prayer! … Survival is your main goal. Living frugally whether by choice or not, is important. Getting to the next painting is your ultimate goal.
• Identify your market. Recognize “who” can purchase your work.
• Diversification. Not only does diversification help you grow as an artist, but it provides other opportunities for you to show your work and advertise your name as well as provide alternative income!
• Dependability. Unfortunately artists are not known for keeping schedules, arriving on time for appointments, or generally running their affairs in an orderly and responsive manner. Go the extra mile and remain dependable at all costs. Be responsive and provide the best customer service possible.
• Develop a support system. Develop relationships with other artists and friends you can trust.

Not enough to qualify for me to use to write complete posts (although one or two have the potential for me to expand upon at some future date), here are some links I’ve come across recently that you might find useful in your creative efforts.

• 19 Online Destinations for Boosting Creativity | LifeDev
  What the title says. Not all of these are favorites of mine, but they may help you.
• TED Talks: Do schools kill creativity?
  Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
• Designing Through the Storm | A List Apart
  “We’ve all experienced low points, and whether they’re caused by tight timelines, hostile clients, infighting, personal disasters, or something else entirely, we have to find a way to work through them.”
• 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity
  Lifehack.org talks about some tips to get your creativity rolling.
• 12 Ways to Tap Into an Endless Well of Creativity
  Photoshop-centric tutorial site PSDTuts runs a list that is very similar to my Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity
• On Creativity | A List Apart
  Andy Rutlege talks about the benefits of constraints on design projects. “Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant.”

Looking for a good online source of inspiration for your images? Enter FFFFOUND!, a website that lets you bookmark images (as opposed to pages like del.icio.us using a bookmarklet to install in your browser. I recently discovered it and for now it’s invitation only. (I managed to get an invite from someone on Twitter.)

Once you have added images to your bookmarks, other users on the FFFFOUND! site can add your images to their profiles as well, thus making them one of your followers. Your images are then recommended to them in a big pool. It’s a little confusing at first since it’s pretty organic and doesn’t have a whole lot of immediate structure, but looking at the cool images is addictive. It’s like the early days of the internet, only with beautiful and bizarre images. I don’t like that I can’t search for anything, and tagging isn’t available. Maybe we’ll be able to do that when it gets out of beta?

At any rate, it’s a good source for ideas and inspiration, with what seems to be an emphasis in advertisements and commercial photography, the kind of stuff that might turn up in Communication Arts if it were less conservative.

Naturally, I bookmarked some really cool images of bridges and Modernist typography.

Seth Godin produces some really nice gems on his blog. I’ve never read his books, but I always appreciate what he has to say on his blog. Today he mentioned how someone recently asked if posting to his blog every day is a big chore or not, in his post Have to vs. Get to. Here’s what he has to say about it:

I view it as something I get to do. I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.

The best work, at least for me, is the stuff you get to do. If you are really good at that, you’re lucky enough to have very little of the have to stuff left.

This is totally true if you’re practicing art, and it goes hand in hand with the idea of “turning pro.” Don’t view what you do as what you “have” to do, but look at it as what you have the privilege of doing.