Tips to inspire creativity: Have several blank working journals: Blank journals are great places to keep visual and descriptive diaries of your ideas. You can include magazine clippings, photos, crumbs and leaf pressings from a park walk. Journals are where you can go when you need ideas too.
Look for things that inspire you in your environment: Be present to the beauty in the things around you. Contemplate beauty in simple objects in your home or outside your window. Start to write down what you find beautiful. Share that with a creative friend too.
Go into nature and enjoy the natural forms: Go on a stroll. Pretend you're a poet and go to a park, garden or mountain. Sit down and breathe. Stare and breathe some more. Art making is a type of meditation. Start some simple sketches while contemplating how all aspects of life are related. Become whole and connected to what is around you in nature. Wake up early and watch the sunrise or drive to a pretty place to paint a sunset.
Let your art making be a gift to yourself: Keep what you absolutely love. Cherish it as you learn to cherish yourself. Let your art speak to you too. Be willing to explore different vulnerable aspects of yourself that may me challenging to first accept. You may surprise yourself. It's like port, it gets better with time.
Cherish what is meaningful or inspirational to you: Frame a page from your journal, or a wine label that has special memory. Place it somewhere that you can see it everyday and be reminded of what inspires you.
Take a class: Register in an intensive one day or weekend class with an artist you admire. Enroll in community extension courses or a vacation art class in a faraway place. There's nothing like adventure to get the focus and inspiration going.
Go to your favorite museum and museum book store: Take your sketch pad. Note how artists interpret nature, city life, people, and thoughts in different ways. Look at art you like and art you do not like. (Look at the door handles, all the accessories. Great for people watching as well)
There are no rules to what makes art art: There is no one way to make art. The world is yearning for your particular personal interpretation. Basically, the overwhelming consensus between all artists is the willingness to make it and share it. You too can be an artist from just the act and practice of making it, no matter what you personally think about it.
Take note of what fascinates you: In the area of art, having an obsession may be valuable to the experience. It will confirm for you the colors that you love, art mediums that intrigue you, textures you wish to recreate, themes of images you wish to render. Have "in-joyment" for what you care about.
Take photos and put them in a journal or on the wall.
Talk to your creative friends: Find out how they get inspired to make art. You can discover what you are passionate about and discover many more things about others, and the art you wish to make.
Indulge: Buy the best quality materials you can afford. (Skip a Sushi dinner if you have too.) Don't need to buy a lot of supplies, just what you need.
Go to Open Studios: Meet and speak with other artists. Snoop politely in their home or studio. Realize you too can stick a few drawings up on the wall and invite people to your house for an Open Studio. It is as simple as that. No degrees or credentials needed to share your art with the world.
Be willing to grow with your art: Remember how the first pancake at breakfast can come out funny and imperfect? Have patience with yourself. It's supposed to be a discovery process and something personal. Check the inner critic and be willing to be forgiving and nurturing.
Take a self development course: Get support and take responsibility for your blocks and excuses for not making art. Blocks are usually all past and fear based issues that are collapsed in perceptions of failure and doubt. It's all just human. If you can find clarity, focus, and let go of the disempowering beliefs you have, you can create a path for your "unbridled expressions of the world".
Have partnerships: Art making is often a solitary expression and warranted as such. But it can also be done with a mate or friend present, whether they are making art too. Be willing to have your community support you in any way you like. Give your art away as expressions of your love and contribution.
Be willing to be fulfilled and happy in your commitment to your artistic, creative self!
About Andrea Fono:
Andrea Fono has been a professional artist since she was 22 years old. She has traveled and exhibited her work extensively around the world. Her favorite paintings are those which combine her inspired spiritual discoveries with her love of nature.
Andrea is committed to a world where everyone knows themselves as creative and artists of their own lives.
She is currently editing her documentary, Inspired in Fiji, about bringing art supplies to village children in Fiji. She intends to combine her passion for teaching and travel into a series of programs that introduce people to the basics of art making. She lives with her husband, Frank Rocky, and her dog, Sappho, in San Carlos, California.
