How changing a point of view stimulates creativity

Inspiring photos from the process

Most of the time I don’t take any photos while working on my mixed media art as I’m just so much into it. Surfing on the creative flow makes me enjoy the moment only and I completely forget the world around me.

But since I decided - due to Covid 19 - to teach my mixed media class online I try to take more pictures of the work in progress as this allows me to better explain different steps and approaches to my students.

I thought of these photos as an inspiration for te participants of my classes. I hadn’t expected that these photos would be also a great source of inspiration for me!

Being able to spin back the process, allows me to see the potential I may have missed or remember the ideas which came up during the process and which I wasn’t able to follow straight ahead.

And that’s not all!

Turn and resize photos for a new point of view

By editing the photos, turning them upside down and resizing them, I stimulate my creativity.

These two photos of a mixed media cowl illustrate what I mean:

This close up photo was automatically turned 90° in my phone. I first wanted to trun it “right” but finally found it much more appealing this way.

Both cowl-photos were taken pretty much at the same moment.

Often my telephone just turn photos taken in “landscape mode” into “portrait mode”, forcing me to edit them and turn them “right”. But when I turned the detail photo “right” it was less appealing to me, so I switched it back and looked at the creation with new eyes, wondering why.

The way the detail photo is “framed” as well as the “portrait view” allowed me to discover a scenery I hadn’t seen before: a kind of industrial landscape with giant birds sitting on a roof .

YES I have a vibrant fantasy!!! and YES this scenery needs a little bit more of shaping but what I want to outline is how a new pont of view, a new angle stimulants creativity! The most important thing it needs to be creative is to see things! Once you can see it - imagine it - you can make it !!!.

The detail photo gave me two new ideas:

reshaping the cowl and making a tableau instead of a cowl.
using the photo as a base for a digital drawing

Before I looked on the photos I I already had taken another decision: as I wasn’t really satisfied with the colors, I overpainted the orange (which I imagine to be a building) with gold paint. So I probably will go for idea n° 2 and use this photo as a starting point for a digital drawing.

Still, who knows - Inspiration may strike again!