Creativity Blast! Expand Your Creative Potential with 5 Daily Exercises

1. Creativity Blast!: Creativity is the foundation of innovation. It's the catalyst that allows us to see the world differently, making connections that would otherwise go unnoticed. Just like a muscle, creativity can be developed and strengthened through daily training. Hey, guys. My name is Kyler and Carson. I am a graphic designer, illustrator and top teacher here on Skillshare. I've worked with healthcare organizations to develop branding and logo designs. I've created illustrations for local nonprofits and community organizations, as well as an assortment of other creative projects. I am no stranger to having clients come to me to help solve their creative issues, whether it be design, illustration, video, or something else entirely. I am tasked with a mission to find creative solutions. I believe creativity is a muscle that can be developed, and this is why each morning I start my day with a ten minute creative workout. There's no need for fancy tools to exercise your creativity. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen to get those creative juices flowing. In this class, I've laid out five daily exercises that will help develop your creative thinking so you can see the world in new and novel ways. By the end of this class, you'll understand the foundation of creativity and how you can better develop a daily habit to supercharge your creative potential. Okay. Creativity is not a special gift given to a chosen few, but it is an integral part of what makes us human. So if you're ready for a creativity blast, I'll see you in class. 2. Class Project and Resources: Welcome to creativity blast, class full of self discovery, creative exercises, and learning how to increase your creative potential. Throughout this class, we will dive into understanding how creativity works, where original ideas come from, and how we can develop our creative thinking through a set of five daily exercises. These exercises are short, ten minute creative workouts that focus on essential skills that when developed can help lead to creative breakthroughs. Although these practices are geared towards illustrators and designers, I really think everyone can benefit from the lessons that follow. To get started with this class, you'll need some paper and a pen, as well as a timer of some kind. You can use your phone, but I'll explain why I have a dedicated timer for this practice when we get to the habit building section. If you want some more structure for the exercises, I have provided worksheets for each of the lessons that can easily get you started. But note, in order to understand how to use the material, please first watch the class related to the worksheet so you can understand how the exercises work. After the creative exercises, we will dive into how to implement a daily creative habit into our lives. I've spent years developing various positive habits in my life. Some successful, others not. I'll talk about how habits form, as well as some best practices to get your habit off on the right track. Your class project is to create your own ten minute daily creative workout by using any one of the five exercises shown. You can modify the exercise to fit your own needs. You can simply take a picture of the exercise you completed and share any ways you'll implement your own creative workout. If you're ready to get creative. I'll see you in class. 3. Creativity: Building Your Muscles: In this class, we will quickly talk about creativity and how we can develop more of it in our daily lives. Creativity is a muscle that can be developed, and we can do this through daily creative exercises. Pushing ourselves to complete creative exercises, develops our creative muscles and can help rewire our brains in order to make it more adept at finding new connections and in turn more original ideas. The ability to think originally is a highly sought after skill that if you can attain will set you apart from others in your industry. One thing that often prevents people from creating original ideas is that they get idea fatigue, a point in time where they become exhausted in their creative pursuit and stop short of finding innovation. People are often overly critical of their initial ideas and end up giving up too early. But what we find in highly creative people is that they push past their idea fatigue and overcome self criticism to explore uncharted territories where true creativity lies. Albert Einstein once said, it's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Endurance is one factor that will determine whether or not we reach our creative potential. He also said, most people stop looking when they find the proverbial needle in the haystack. I would continue looking to see if there were other needles. If you find yourself having a hard time developing ideas or becoming stagnant and becoming content with your first idea without exploring more possibilities, the exercises shown in this class will help strengthen your creative muscles so you can do more reps and lift more creative weight. Just as if we stop exercising our physical muscles, they become weak and over time, our strength decreases. If we neglect to put into practice a creative habit, our creativity will trify and we will have a harder and harder time coming up with original ideas. Some exercises in the class are geared towards creativity in general, and others are for illustrators and designers. However, wherever you are on your creative journey, you will benefit from the lessons that follow. These practices can be used simply as exercises to work out those creative idea generating muscles or as a quick warm up before your creative tasks to get you in the right mindset and get your gears turning. Everyone is unique and the exercises described are not hard and fast rules that have to be applied exactly as shown. You can modify your practice to fit your creative needs after understanding the principles of the practices. Just think of these exercises as a starting point in which you can develop your own creative habit and work out your creative muscles. Going back to the exercise analogy, we all have different body types and we all have different goals for our bodies. To say that there is one size fits all workout routine that solves every physical goal would just be ridiculous. But the one thing that applies to all achievements is consistency. It's the same with creativity. We all have different ways of learning and different goals. We will have to discover what works for us based on our wants and our needs. But the most important part to move towards success is consistency in your practice. In a later class, we will dive into how to create a habit out of our creative exercises, understanding how habits form and what we can do to make our practice more effective and get our habits to stick. One thing I would like to ask of you as we embark on this creative journey is to let go of any assumptions and just enjoy the process. Having the mind of a child is so important for developing creativity as they let their inhibitions run wild and allow their minds to create whatever their hearts desire. Pablo Picasso said, every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. In the next class, we will look at the fundamental principle of idea generation, and through this understanding, we will have insight on how the practices work to develop your creative thinking. I'll see you there. 4. Idea Generation: Connecting the Dots: In this last will dive into how ideas are formed and the principles we can apply in order to take advantage of our creative habit. The information we receive in our daily life is at the core of our creative thinking. What we see, what we learn are all dots that have potential to be connected in exciting ways. Creative thinkers are able to connect these dots in unexpected ways to generate new and innovative ideas. Let's look first at how ideas can be generated by the concept of the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible simply means the possibilities that can be created with your current knowledge and information. They are the potential combinations of what you already possess. When you connect the things you already know in new ways, original ideas can be developed. The more you learn, the more dots you have to connect and the more possibility for creative opportunities will be available. As a simple example, I will use the information set of letters in the alphabet. Let's say the only letter you know is the letter A. How many adjacent possibilities are there. Zero. With limited knowledge and information, there is no room for possibilities. There's no room for innovation. However, after we increase our knowledge and add more information, the adjacent possibilities start to appear and the more opportunity for creative endeavors emerge. Let's say we now add the letter C and T to our knowledge base. With these three letters, now within our scope, we can freely connect the dots and combine them in new and novel ways. How many possibilities do we have now? With the letters A C and T, the adjacent possibilities are the combinations of the things we know. We can now create words like Act, CT, at tech or even abbreviations like CTA or TCA, by adding two more dots, we have multiplied our creative thinking exponentially, and now we have nearly limitless possibilities. Creative minds are masters of connecting dots in unique ways. But before we can be dot connectors, we first must be dot collectors. Unless we spend some time collecting new dots, meaning learning in our chosen field, Our idea generation will remain limited. And this is where the class exercises come in. We are constantly bombarded with information every single day. So we are not so limited in the information and knowledge. What we may struggle with is learning how to connect these daily occurrences in unexpected ways that can later be developed into creative pursuits. Let me share with you one way I was able to make an unexpected connection and turn it into a creative pursuit. I, the creation of a skill share class. I was just getting started on my journey as a teacher on Skillshare. I made two classes so far and I was hoping to make a third. At that time, I was having so much fun using shape building tools in Adobe illustrator, and I wanted to make a class on how to use the pathfinder tools to create illustrations. But I wanted to make it unique in some way. To practice my skills, I decided to do a series of illustrations with the thought. What would it look like to have a digital tool as a physical product. Through this question, I was able to illustrate keyboard shortcuts, the pen tool, the brush tool, and various others. But then I got to the Pathfinder panel. I asked myself, how can I make the Pathfinder panel into a physical product? At the time, I was having a pizza night at home, and I thought, what would it look like to apply the pathfinder options to a pizza. I hopped on the Illustrator and I started to experiment. I then created a fictional company called the Pathfinder Pizza Company. By connecting the Pathfinder panel with pizza, I was able to create a series of eight illustrations. That was a great creative opportunity. But it didn't stop there. After creating these illustrations, I asked, how could I incorporate this into my skill share class? I asked the question, what if the Pathfinder panel was a pizza menu, and the shapes were the toppings. That's how the shape building master class was formed. In the next class, we'll start our first creative exercise. Grab a pen and a piece of paper, and I'll see you in class. 5. Exercise 1: Word Blast: Let's get our creative juices flowing with our first exercise. Words have an important role in our creative process as words can easily lead our imagination to see what is unseen. As we go through our daily life, we often miss out seeing the connections of seemingly unrelated things. However, if we learn to make new associations and learn to develop our creative thinking through creative exercises, over time, we'll have an easier time making these connections and have more opportunity for creative growth. Okay. I'll briefly explain the exercise we will do and then go through some tips to help you make the most of the process in order to get the most effective result. For each of the exercises going forward, we will use a timer. For now, feel free to use your phone or another timing device. However, in the class about habit formation, we will dive into best practices for how to set up your daily practice. The timer will be used to help you focus in on the task at hand. This will also be a tool to let yourself be free to just explore. After the time is up, there's no pressure to continue for that day. Your job is done. There are no grades, there are no right or wrong answers. This is about letting go and allowing your creative thinking to flourish. For this exercise, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen. Word blast is a word association challenge that will help you make more connections in your creative thinking. Your job is to start with a word at the center of your page. It could be a subject or an activity. It doesn't quite matter, and then blasting out like spokes on a wheel, write words that are associated with the central word. As you write more and more words, you can then draw spokes out from the new words created and make more connections. As an example, I'll use the word energy. When we think of the word energy, many things come to mind, and it may be different for everyone. Lightning, speed, batteries, charge, rocket, electricity, fuel, sugar health, coffee. By doing this exercise, we can dive into building more relationships and finding novel connections that at first, we may not have seen. Afterwards, we'll be more comfortable exploring our creative minds and generating increasingly original ideas. You can set your timer to five or 10 minutes and as the clock counts down, start writing as many words as you can, and try to push past your initial assumptions and see if you can discover connections you couldn't see before. A great way of finding new words and connections is to think like a child? A child is always curious and asks questions constantly. Trust me. I know, I have a toddler that interrogates me every day about all the things in the kitchen. Oh, what's this? What's that? Why does it make that sound, Daddy? What's that? How does this work? So if you're stuck, try unleashing your inner toddler and bombard yourself with questions. Where does this come from? How does it work? What does it mean? Does it glow? Is it hot? Is it hot? This is a great question. In regard to energy. It instantly made me think of red hot. What's red hot? Molten lava. Now, I just associated energy with molten lava. However, this connection for me would not have been made unless I started asking questions. This is why questions are so important for your creative process. Let yourself ask some stupid questions from time to time because it may just be the prompt you need to get yourself moving forward. If you want some direction to get started with this exercise, I've provided printable worksheets that you can use with pre populated central words, simply print it out, set your timer and go. I can't stress enough that this is not about perfection. Although it may be hard at first and you may struggle with coming up with 20 or 30 words, after practicing it, it'll become easier and you'll find yourself unable to stop finding new words. Just have fun. In the next class, we will tackle our next exercise, the shape blast. I'll see you there. 6. Exercise 2: Shape Blast: An. Let's dive into exercise number two. Shape blast. In the previous exercise, we learned to generate associations between words and developed an increasing number of connections with the power of questions. In this class, we will continue our pursuit of our creative potential by using creative constraints to develop our original thinking and problem solving ability. In essence, creative ideas are simply solutions to problems and the ability to work through a wide range of solutions will give you an advantage to get you to your solution faster and produce higher quality results. During this exercise, as well as all exercises, I want you to forgo your inner perfectionist and let go of your desire to focus on quality. Here's why. When we focus our efforts in perfecting and refining a single idea, we limit ourselves on opportunities we can learn from. However, if we open ourselves to explore as many avenues, we will find more things that work as well as things that don't. Through this learning, the overall quality of our work will increase. We must learn to accept that not everything we make will be perfect. But if we just keep creating and exploring those wow worthy ideas will inevitably happen. Focusing on quantity is like having your foot on the gas, you'll reach your destination soon. But when we focus on quality before quantity, it's like having your foot on the brake. You'll not move forward until you learn to let go. Remember this. Quality comes from learning. Learning comes from doing. The more you do, the more you learn. And the higher quality you will create. For this exercise, you'll need a piece of paper and a pen. Shape blast is a creative exercise to develop your problem solving ability and increase your original thinking. It consists of starting with one or two simple shapes in the middle of your page and making unique combinations while sticking to a set of constraints. By setting specific constraints, you must think outside the box to develop original ideas. As an example, we have a circle in the center of our page. Our job is to take the circle shape and arrange it in as many unique ways as possible while not breaking the rules stated, The rules are the shape must be used at least one time and you must scale the shape proportionally. An example is the circle cannot become an oval or a square cannot become a rectangle. Keeping this in mind, let's set our timer for 10 minutes and start developing our ideas. I start drawing a line blasting out from the center shape and I'll draw my first iteration. Just a simple circle. Then I'll draw another line and I'll start asking questions. How else can this shape be arranged? Well, the rule is, we must use this shape at least once. That means I can duplicate it. Now that I know that I can use more than one circle? What else can I try? I can overlap the shapes, I can stack multiple shapes, I can add contrasting sizes, I can create a formation, I can make it revolve. Should I fill in the shape or keep it as an outline? Now that we have been asking questions and discovering what I can do, I can push each of these concepts further by asking more specific questions. How many ways can I overlap the shapes? Can I add more contrast? I can think of what I've already created as potential categories or groups of designs. Drawing a line from my secondary shapes, I branch out into more possibilities of that group. Then I can try to combine iations to make something more unique from what I had before. Instead of just being abstract with my shapes, I can use the shapes to create more literal interpretations, like a snowman or a face. As you can see, from a simple shape, an infinite number of possibilities are available. You just need to keep trying new things and asking more questions. Again, if you want some direction to get you started, I have provided printable worksheets that you can use with assigned shapes, simply print it out and set your timer and go. I recommend just using basic shapes for this exercise because you're going to have to redraw them over and over again. So they're easy to scale and it allows you to problem solve. Although you may not get any incredible designs from this exercise, that's okay. It's the exercise itself that matters. It's training your brain to be okay with pushing forward and exploring new ideas. This is probably one of my favorite exercises. Since it's super simple, you can get a new result every time and the possibilities are nearly limitless. Just remember, everyone is unique and you can modify your practice to fit your creative needs. You can change the constraints, the shapes, the time, however you see fit. I have taken on many logo design projects over the years and sometimes the solution comes to me right away, and it works out. But other times I keep trying and nothing is jumping out like this is it. In times like this, it is essential that we have built up our creative endurance in order to push through and keep exploring more ways to accomplish our mission. When I was designing a logo for a University Bible club, I made so many attempts to develop a memorable and eye catching logo that holds meaning. Iteration after iteration, nothing satisfied my internal critic. However, I eventually ended up with the final result which showed the contrasting and H of the Mystery lies in History Bible club name, as well as the connections of the two letters by using swooping arrows. The goal of the club was to share love with their fellow students and community. The intersection of the arrows also formed the shape of a heart. And when I got to this point, I had that. This is it moment. I would have never come to this design solution without having the insurance to push through all the design iterations and constantly trying out new ideas. By practicing this exercise, your creative insurance increases and will allow you to go further than ever before. In the next class, we'll get into some sketching practices to help you collect more dots and add to your visual library. I'll see you there. 7. Exercise 3: Reference Blast: Let's jump right into our next exercise reference blast. We've learned how to work out our creative muscles by word association, asking questions and using constraints to unlock our creative potential. For this exercise, we will be spending time putting our pen to paper and collecting more creativity dots by developing our visual library. Our visual library is the place in our mind that we can pull from when we want to create, explore, and experiment with new creative ideas. If you have a limited visual library, your creative ideas will therefore be limited. But if we continually add to it, our creative potential will be unlimited. This exercise is put into three parts, two five minute sections, and a third section that is optional, but very beneficial for building your visual library. The three sections are draw from reference, draw from memory, and reflect and correct. Section one is draw from reference. This is the time you'll visually analyze and try to copy your chosen reference picture. I will show you how to choose your reference picture in a bit. Section two is draw from memory. In this section, you will put your reference away and cover your previous drawing and try to sketch out the subject by memory. You only got 5 minutes, so don't worry about having perfect lines or how accurate it really is. Just try to articulate the image as best as you can in your style. The third section is reflect and correct. This is where you analyze the reference alongside your first and second drawings. You will want to make notes of the proportions, the shapes, the positions that may have shifted between drawings from reference and from memory. By doing so, you will help lock in the subjects information into your visual library. I recommend getting a different color pen to make these notes. This will help you visually see the adjustments. Of course, the more times you repeat this process, the better you will be at recalling and drawing from memory. So if you have time to repeat the cycle, go over it one more time and make notes of what have improved and what you are still struggling with. If you practice this often, you will build up your own sketch notes library. And you can call back to it whenever you want to start sketching something again. To set this exercise up, you'll need a reference image. I suggest having a collection of references readily available to you for when you want to do this exercise. I recommend printing out a handful and when you want to do this practice, randomly select one, set your timer and go. The randomness of the selection process keeps you on your toes, add some spontaneity, and this also gives you an unexpected challenge or possibly if it's an easy reference for you, a happy, easy going session. Consistently making a habit of drawing from reference, we'll build up your visual library so you can connect more dots and have more confidence in your practice. If you don't have many dots to connect, the ideas you can generate are limited. The more dots you add to your library, the more possibilities are at your disposal. This is why having a daily practice of drawing from reference is a great habit for idea generation. For this exercise, I've provided printable worksheets for you to use. One sheet is a selection of random reference pictures for you to print out. If you want to select your own reference, feel free, it's your practice. You can decide what you want to draw. The second sheet is a simple template, which is broken into two sections. One section is for your draw from reference and another section for drawing from memory. Simply draw from reference and then cover the section so it's no longer visible and then draw from memory. Afterwards, you'll have both drawings side by side so you can analyze, take a different color pen and make some sketch notes. In the next class, we will continue adding to our visual library with a sketch last. I'll see you there. Okay. 8. Exercise 4: Sketch Blast: Welcome to sketch blast. In this exercise, we will continue our pursuit of adding dots to our visual library so we can have greater opportunity for creative solutions when opportunity strikes. Last time we used a reference picture for our practice, but this time, we are going into the real world and selecting a household object. This exercise will help develop a greater understanding of three dimensional forms, as well as ad in understanding how to break down complex forms into more basic shapes. By understanding how to break down forms into simple shapes, it will make it easier for you to remember objects and build up your visual library. Whether you are good at drawing or not, this is a fun exercise that if practiced consistently will improve your drawing ability and allow you to have more fun expressing things from your imagination. As with all exercises, I want you to let go of any expectations and let yourself freely explore with your pen or pencil. No judgment, no pressure, have fun and experiment. To complete this exercise, all you have to do is grab an object that you have laying around. I would recommend choosing something that has a super simple shape, but still has some variety, like a coffee mug, a book, a bowl, a toy car, earbuds, even a pen that you have lying around. There's no right or wrong answer. Sketch blast consists of choosing your object, setting your timer for 10 minutes and sketching the object as many times as you can in various angles. Since you will draw your subject from various angles, it is good to choose something that is quite small and easy to manipulate. It might help if you have a book or something else to prop up your object, so you can a variety on how it is displayed. As an example, I'm going to use this mug. The first thing that I'll do is I'll look at it front on and draw the shapes that make it up. Looking at it front on, it's a simple tapered rectangle and a C shape for the handle. Now I can move on to a new angle. Do I notice any new shapes? From the bottom, well, it's a circle with a rectangle coming out of the side. To get started with sketch blast, I recommend drawing the object without using perspective, simply looking at the various planes of the object, front, back, side, top, bottom. Once you get those down, then you can push yourself to work towards the three dimensional forms. I'll change the position of the mug again. Now, if I look at it in perspective, the top section is an oval and the bottom has a curve. I could draw two ovals and connect them with two vertical lines and then draw in the handle. For more complex objects, it's better to start by building up simple three dimensional forms like blocks and cylinders, then go back in to add more detail. However, if you've never drawn in three dimension for the sketch blast exercises, I would recommend just using basic forms and drawing them at different angles without adding any detail, like drawing a block or a book or a soda can without the tapered ends. I'm going to continue my sketch blast rotating my object at various angles and see how many times I can draw it within 10 minutes. In our previous shape last exercise, we drew basic shapes over and over again, combining them in various ways. That not only helped our creative thinking. It also gave us a lot of practice in getting comfortable drawing circles and squares and triangles and ovals, which is important in breaking down your objects during your sketch blast exercise. This practice really helps when you want to draw from memory and creates something unique. I draw a lot of characters and add personality to everyday objects. A lot of the time I just draw from memory. I can only do this because I've put in some work to understand the forms of the things around me. All these drawings, you see, I did spontaneously at the request of friends and family. I didn't have a taco or a table readily available for me to reference. But from my accumulated visual library, I had a general understanding of the forms and could create the illustrations freely when prompted. Practicing this sketch blast will eliminate the need to always have a reference for your initial sketches, and this allows you to play around with your ideas in a more easy going way. In the next class, we will discover our final exercise and have fun generating creative ideas. I'll see there. 9. Exercise 5:Creativity Blast: Okay. Welcome to the final exercise. Creativity blast. We've stimulated our creative muscles by asking questions to break down assumptions and force us to make novel connections. We've unlocked our problem solving skills by using constraints, and we have added more creative dots to our visual library. So we have more resources at our disposal to generate unique ideas. Now it's time to blast our creativity into outer space with our final exercise. Creativity blast is an exercise developed to explore the vast possibilities and learn to see things in interesting and novel ways. We'll take a simple subject break it down into its basic forms and then blast it out into an alternate reality in which the only limit is your creative imagination. Let's take a look at how we can implement this practice. To start this exercise, you can either use a reference or you can use up your built up visual library as a starting point. Again, it doesn't necessarily have to be a thing. You can try this with typography by picking a letter. Whatever you want to explore works just fine. For this example, I'll go back and use this mug. After we have decided on our subject, we will then break it down to its basic structure and see how the subject is made out. We will draw the basic building blocks of our subjects in the middle of our page. We will set our timer for 10 minutes and blast off. We will draw lines bursting out from our center shape, and at the end of each line, we will take our shapes and stretch and push and pull them in various ways to see how far we can take our subject. Keeping in mind, we still want our illustration to have the likeness of the subject itself. The mug, although the proportions are stretched and it has changed dramatically, it is still recognized as a mug. You can keep things simple, or you can dive in and go for more detail. But remember, this is just a ten minute exercise. It's better to explore as many possibilities than to focus too much on the detail and perfecting the illustration. There are no limits to this exercise. If you think you need to add something to develop it into a new creative possibility, do so. If you want to transform the mug into a rocket ship, do so as long as it still reads as a mug. Maybe during the exercise, you've come up with some really fun creative idea that you really want to pursue further. Okay. Make note of it, flag it in your sketchbook so you can access it when you want to develop it further. To get you started with this exercise, I've provided printable worksheets for you to use. I have placed a reference picture in the middle and outline the basic shapes. You can blast out from the center and explore the creative possibilities. Now that you have seen a variety of daily exercises, we can implement to increase our creative potential. I want to walk you through some of the best practices on how to form a daily creative habit. Without having a consistent practice, our creative muscles will weaken. But if we are able to do even a little bit every day, our creative potential will soar higher than we ever sought possible. I'll see you in the next clash. 10. Habits: Understanding How Habits Form: In the following class, we will learn how to set ourselves up for success when developing our creative habit. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. The practices you've learned so far in this class, if only practice once or twice may give some initial benefit. But in order to get the most out of our creative exercises, we must learn to implement them into our daily lives. Habits are like a compass that point us in the direction of our ultimate destination. Doing your habit is like taking one step closer to that destination. If you have a habit of overeating, eventually, you're going to gain weight. If you have a habit of exercising, over time, you will get stronger. If you learn to develop a habit of strengthening your creative thinking, over time, we will become creative thinkers. Now, the goal is not to do every exercise every day. The goal is to do one exercise that lasts only 10 minutes consistently on a day to day basis. Everyone, no matter how busy you are, you can put aside 10 minutes in your day to devote to your creative development. I know what you're thinking. I've tried to create a habit and it didn't work, or there are too many distractions that I can't focus on this. I want to address all these concerns here and share with you some best practices to help get your habit off on the right foot. To understand how we can effectively develop a habit, we must first understand the key structure of how habits form and what exactly goes on in our brain. There are three things that are required for a habit to develop. You need a cue, you need the act or the habit and you need a reward. A is something that triggers the habit or act. The habit, in other words, the act itself, and the reward. This can be an intrinsic reward of, Hey, I just accomplished my goal. Now, the primary motivator that makes your mind develop a habit is the reward. Your brain recognizes the reward as a good thing, and therefore, it is important that it repeats whatever you did to get that reward again. Your brain looks back at the sequence of events that led to that reward. First, the habit and then ultimately the Q. Your brain then makes an association between these three events. This association then becomes stronger, the more times you repeat this cycle, Q Habit reward, Q habit reward. Since your brain is looking for the reward, after it sees the Qe, it releases a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is often connected to pleasure, but it is also used as a preemptive motivator to get you to pursue the act that leads to the reward, that is associated with that Q. This is why we feel an urge to do something in various situations. Like when you smell fast food, you start to want it and actually feel hungry, even though a moment before, you had no such desire. Now that we have a basic understanding of how habits work, we will learn how to set up a creative habit for maximum potential. I'll see in the next class. 11. Habits: Establishing Your Creative Habits: Okay. Now that we understand a little bit about what goes on in the brain when a habit is developed. Let's go through some best practices to create our daily creative ritual. The first thing to do when developing habit is when we should do our daily exercise. It's best to practice it at a similar time each day as part of your normal routine. Maybe right after you wake up, when you come home from work, right before bed, we are all different and we all have different schedules, and our biological clocks may differ. This is why you must decide when you can put aside 10 minutes on a regular basis for your practice and do it consistently until the habit is developed. It has said that it takes about 60 days for a habit to be locked in. So be patient. You'll have to do the habit cycle consciously at first, but over time, you will hardly need to think about it at all. To better achieve the habit, you can link it with something you already do. You wake up, you brush your teeth. After you brush your teeth, do your daily exercise. You might have to wake up 10 minutes earlier to fit it in, but over time, your body will adjust and you'll do it without effort. Now we are at our table, our desk or wherever we're going to do our practice. It's good to have a consistent place to do it. And then also have everything you need readily available. You want to make it as easy as possible to start your creative exercise. This is why I always have a pen and a sketchbook within arm's reach, and that's all I need to get started. Now it's time to talk about the timer. I said at the beginning of the class that you can use your phone as a timer, but when it comes time to develop a habit, it'll make things dramatically harder for your habit to stick. Here's why. Your phone is a reward generating machine. Every time you unlock your phone, you check your notifications or e mail or social media and you get a boost of dopamine. And therefore, your brain has made an association with your phone, that when you unlock it, your brain will push you to the act that leads to the reward. IE, check social media or something like this. Since an association has already been developed between you unlocking your phone and getting some reward from some app, It will be much harder to make a new connection that pushes you in the direction of one such as the creative exercises. This is why I highly recommend getting a separate timer designated specifically for your daily practice. It doesn't have to be anything special, just a simple kitchen time rule do. But I do recommend something that allows you to visually see time passing. It's much easier to build a habit from a novel cue that has no current association than to have to fight with previous conditioning. I have a specific timer that I use for my practice, and my brain knows that when I set that timer to 10 minutes, it's time to work. My phone is put to the side, so there's no distractions and I see the timer counting down and I am focused. The same principle can be implemented with your sketchbook as well. Having a specific sketchbook for your practice tells your mind that when this book is open, there is only one thing that it needs to do. It's time for a creativity blast. I want to emphasize again that it takes roughly 60 days for a habit to develop. Don't get discouraged if it's hard at first. If you push through and keep building the Q habit Q habit reward relationship, you'll be activating your creative mind effortlessly. Even if you miss a day, don't discourage yourself and just try again. And when you complete one round, give yourself a big pat on the back and solidify that habit association. 12. Additional Tips: My Personal Practices: So As a final class, I want to leave you with a few additional tips for training your creative muscles. These are things that I have found that have significantly increased my creative thinking, and I want to share them with you. As with everything in this course, we are all made differently. What works for me, might not work for you. So everything that has been taught can be altered to fit your specific needs. Take what you want and leave what you don't. If you think only one of these exercises practice will benefit you, just do that one. If you've found that these aren't your cup of tea at all, No worries. I hope you have learned a bit of how you can better establish habits defined by your own personal values and goals. My first suggestion is stepping back. Creative ideas are heavily influenced by our subconscious mind. So in order to allow your brain to make novel connections and solve problems, you may have to step back from the constant input of information. Sit in silence for a few minutes, go for a walk without distractions. Just let yourself be bored. Allowing your mind to wander can allow your subconscious mind to make connections that aren't apparent at first. In addition to my creative exercises, I have an eight minute meditation practice. I do first thing in the morning. I use an hour glass that has an eight minute cycle, and when it starts trickling down, I sit and let my mind relax, focusing on my breath. Although my mind may try to push me to check my phone or write something down, until the time is done, I resist those urges. Through the single practice, I have seen a significant increase in my focus and controlling my impulses, allowing me to get more creative work done. My second suggestion is to keep a notebook or a sketchbook accessible as often as possible. Ideas can come to us in times we are not expecting, and if we don't note them down soon, they will all but vanish from our mind. Keeping a place for yourself to jot down your ideas and thinking will improve your chances of retaining and being able to execute your creative endeavors. I believe the act of writing things down apart from typing things on the computer has a significant impact on how much information I can retain. I have a notebook on my desk. I have one in my bag, I have a pocket sized notebook, just in case I need to travel light. If you don't have a notebook near you, when inspiration strikes Grab the nearest piece of paper and pen and capture your ideas. You never know when that idea will pay off. My last piece of advice is to try to implement a practice of constant learning. Reading has been one of the most rewarding habits when it comes to my creative thinking as it feeds my mind with ideas and insights from other excel and creative individuals. Videos can be a great resource as well, just like the ones here on skill share. They are very engaging and deliver valuable content in a short amount of time. However, unlike watching videos, reading fully engages your mind as you cannot read and do something else at the same time. Therefore, your mind will soak up and retain more information when reading than just watching a few videos alone. Alongside my reading and learning, I always try to take notes and journal about ideas or thinking that really captured my interests. I try to summarize as best I can from my memory so I can keep that information for when I might want to review it later. We are all constantly growing as creative individuals. Experiment in finding what works for you and find fulfillment in the process. Creativity is not a destination. It is a constant journey of discovery. I encourage you to do your own countdown and blast stop 13. Thank You! You Are Awesome: I want to thank you so much for joining me in this class. This has been such a fun class to teach as it is quite different from what I've taught in the past. It also gave you a better look into my personal creative process, and I'm so glad I could share with you. Everyone is different and have their own personal creative journey. So what works for me may not work for you. And that's okay. What I hope you can take from this class is that wherever you are on your creative journey, there is always time to increase your creative potential. Try applying the things taught in the habit building section to something that resonates with you. It could be 10 minutes of learning a new language, writing short stories, poems, or whatever your heart desires. My hope for you is that you begin. A lot of opportunities in life are missed because we have delayed getting started. If you did a little bit every day over the next year, just imagine where you could be. If you have tried one of the exercises in the class, I would love to see it. Simply post a picture in the project panel, and I'll take a look at it. If you tried to implement a new creative habit into your life, I would love to hear your experience. It would be a huge personal favor to me if you left a positive review of the class as it will help other students like you find this class in the future. If you're interested in learning more with me, check out my profile here on Skillshare of my collection of other classes, as well as follow me there so you can be notified when future classes are posted. Okay. If you want to stick around and join me, I provided five bonus lessons in which I'll go through each of the creative exercises while I try my best to give commentary on my thoughts. Thanks again, and I wish you all the best on your creative journey. I'll see you next time. Okay. 14. Bonus 1 Word Blast: Hey, guys, welcome to the bonus lesson. Glad you could join me here. I'm just going to go through the exercises, how I would normally go through it, and I'm going to give you as much commentary as I can, in order to understand my thought process as I go through the exercises. The first one we're going to do is the word blast. Let's jump right in. I'm going to set my timer for 5 minutes, and then I'm going to use the word time. You can use whatever word you'd like. When I think of time, I think of how do I read time clock. Watch. What else? And I think of time, I think of the minute hands. And then just asking that, you know, minute. Maybe think of hour. Second. And then as I go on, then I can look back at anything. What kind of clocks are there? Well, I know that there are the hour glasses. I have one. There's a sundial. That's another type of clock, Watches, you know, that type of watch is a pocket watch, you know, It has hands, it has minutes, hours, seconds. How can we tell time? Well, with the sun dial, the sun, We can go through days months years. How is a year calculated? Well, 365 days, 3605. It's a number that's connected to time. There is 60 seconds in a minute and there is 60 minutes. Minutes in an hour. Sorry. My writing's not the best, but let's go through this. Well, what else can I think of time? I can think of speed because, you know, time and speed are sort of connected. When I think of speed and time, I think of, you know, the speed of light is a unit of time. Of light light speed, you know, space, space travel, you know, it takes time. You know, another form of time is what we do during our time. We work, you know, what else do we do during our time? We have rest time, play time, you know, rest we have time at home. We have time for friends. Okay. Okay. All right. What else can we say with time. There's so much we can say with time. What is the sound that time makes? I would say, you know, it ticks or TikTok goes the clock. Tik Tok makes a sound. That makes me think of the mechanism that actually makes it talk. So, you know, gears, gears. Another part of a clock or time to tell time is the mineral quartz, Quartz is inside many watches, gears, they're mechanical. There are kinetic watches, watches. Kinetic is movement. You move through time movement, kinetic, gears, quartz, mechanical, TikTok. You spend time. I'll just say you can spend spend time, rest, play, sleep, speed of light, travel travel. That makes me think of time travel. What do you need for time travel? You need a time machine. Watch, pocket watch, hands, days, hours months. What is a day? A day has a day and night. It's about, you know, 12 hours, day, 12 hours night, sun shining. And then the moon sort of indicates the time. Um. Okay. If we go through a year, go through a year, what does that mean? The sun orbit or the Earth orbits, you know, the orbiting of the Earth is a certain amount of time, it's 360 years. And the Earth revolves revolves. Okay. As day occurs. So that's that. And yeah. So my time's up. But yeah, looking at time, I was able to connect time with many different things, and I just look back at what I previously stated and see if I can find any other connections with those elements and those words. And obviously, there is an infinite number that could be connected back to time. But that's sort of how I would go through the process in the morning. This really stimulates my brain and gets my gears turning Gears, like a clock, gets them going and running smoothly. This practice is actually really helpful when I'm sort of in a creative block, and I'm trying to move forward towards, you know, a creative endeavor, whether that be a client project or a personal project. I might just think, what am I going to do and I isolate it to a single word? Then I'll take that word, I'll branch it out into a lot of different words. And usually after I branch out to a lot of different words, I'll find some connections, and I can really move forward with my creative project. So it's a good jumpstart, and it's a good exercise to do in the morning and get your gears turning and Yeah, it's really a lot of fun. A lot of times I use this when I'm doing design work or I'm doing client based work and I just want to make something more unique. I go through as many iterations or words as possible in a set amount of time, and it pushes me to push past my initial assumptions, and then I can get things get connections that I never thought I originally had. So, try it out yourself. If you do the project posted in the project panel, take a picture of it. I would love to see what you guys create. If you use the same word as me, I would love to see if there was any different words that you came up with in your 5 minutes. I'll see in the next class. 15. Bonus 2 Shape Blast: Hey, guys, welcome to the second exercise. This is going to be where I am going to go through the shape last exercise. So whenever I do a shape last in the morning, I usually randomly select any shapes or something that I want to pursue and try out and experiment. It doesn't have to necessarily be a shape, but it can be really, whatever you want. Just hold to the constraints that you've decided upon. For me, I've decided to use the shape last exercise in which My shapes have to remain sort of the same. A circle has to stay a circle. Square has to say a square. I'm not going to stretch them anyways. I have to force myself to learn how to combine them in new and novel ways. So for this exercise, I think I'm going to I'll use a circle. And I'm going to use just a plusin because plus sign is really easy to, you know, draw. It's like a simple shape. So I'm going to set my timer. I'm just going to do 5 minutes for this one, and we'll go. The first thing that I can think of is I can draw a circle and I can do the plus side inside. I can draw the circle and then I can do the plus side off to the side, but at an angle, and maybe I can add one off to the side there, maybe it looks like an xx. I can do the reverse of that. Do that. Now I can add some scale to it. Let's add a really big circle circle. That looks pretty cool. Maybe if I do the circle, I can do little x around the edge. That might work and maybe add in little circles as well. Another thing that I can try and do is I can make my circle. I can put my plus sign in the middle and then maybe I can shade in certain sections of where they connect. That looks pretty cool. Let's try that a little bit differently. Let's draw two circles, one on either side of the plus sign like that. Yeah, a little different. Just from what I'm seeing, I can do what I have there, but I can encompass them all in one circle. Again, my circle doesn't have to necessarily be just a stroke. I can fill it in entirely and then on the outside. I can do my plus signs there. I can use multiple circles as well. Maybe I'll stack my circles up and then maybe I have plus signs out I't's do the shading. Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Now, how can I add a more contrast to this. Let's do a big circle like that. Sure. What else can I do with this? Let's do one circle in the middle and maybe plus signs going out from the center. But then with circles on either side, and maybe a revolving. That one's pretty cool. What else can I do with that? Let's see. I can stack plus signs too, so it's more of a line. Looks like a football. Maybe just a nice round football. That one is not perfectly circle, as I stated in my condition, so I'm going to try and change that. But what I could do now that I think about it is I can draw two circles like that. Then I can do my ple signs in the middle like that. Then maybe I can shade in the outside. The center is just the football. That's one way I could work around that situation. I do like experimenting with this one here, so I'm going to draw a little differently, circle here, let's do a big, but then I'm going to draw a circle on either side and maybe shade in there. Then where these ones, I can do a plus side and the inside. That's a different that's cool. This one, Okay. Yeah. Well, this one and this one can sort of I can sort of make it work in a combination form where I have like that. Cool. What else do I got going on here? The, maybe plus in vertical, so it rotates that side by side. Maybe one more. Let's just circle. Let's Really big. Oh, yeah, I guess we can do square like that. Okay. Yeah. And then perfect. Okay. So in 5 minutes, I was able to go through multiple different arrangements of the x and the circle or the plus sign in the circle. And I modified it in various ways. I created angles, tried overlapping them in different ways. Obviously, I went through this pretty quick in 5 minutes. And I was able to experiment and try a few things, and I noticed that I was sort of going back to the same thing over and over again. But that's one thing that you'll learn when you go through this process is you have to start asking more questions and then you can push yourself past your initial assumptions if you get stuck doing the same thing over and over again. So obviously, everybody's practice is going to be a little different and the more often you do it, the better you'll be at coming in and coming up with more original ideas. So try to yourself, if you use the same shapes as me, go ahead. If you use something different, I would love to see what you guys do. Just take a picture of it, post in the project panel. And yeah, let's go to the next class. 16. Bonus 3 Reference Blast: Hey, guys. Welcome back. This is going to be our reference blast exercise. I have decided upon one of my references that I have printed out here. I'm going to just use this simple bird for illustration. Again, I'm just going to do a quick session. So I'll do maybe just 4 minutes for my initial reference, and then I'll do 4 minutes for my draw from memory. So I just draw a line right in the center. And then what I'm going to do for my my draw from reference. I'm going to analyze the picture and just see angles, forms, shapes, stuff like that. So I can see that initially, there is a there's sort of a line that goes like that. And he is pretty big almost a ball, like that. And then from that line, we have his head coming out like that, and a small little beak. Yeah, probably actually smaller than that. But what I'm noticing, his head goes back. Monger and then fat. Then I'll draw in his big eye, and I'm just going to give some shading there. He's got a big belly, big and round. Then his tail feathers come out like that, and he has wings. They start here, and come out and then they almost follow that angle too. And then they go. Then I'm just looking at the angles, seeing what I see. Again, this is just reference. Now that I've drawn in my initial, I can see if there's any areas that I can improve upon, and I can see that, like that. Then here it sort overlaps feathers, so I'm going to sort take note of that and shading and Okay. There's a little overlap here. And then the feathers sort of follow the direction of his stomach. And there's a little bit of sheeting in between. Noticing. And Speaks probably smaller than what I have displayed there, but that's okay. When we do our reflecting correct, we can address that. Okay. Okay. Again, you can be as sketchy as you want. There's no right or wrong answer to this. It's just having fun, feel it out, draw lines through it. You can shade it if you want or just get the forms. But yeah, just have fun with it. It's your practice. You can do what you will with it. I enjoy putting a little detail, and I enjoy being pretty loose with it, especially for these exercises because I'm not planning on really showing anybody them there quick things. It's just for my practice and my personal creative development. So whatever you feel, However, far, you want to feel you want to push your illustrations when you're doing this exercise. Go right ahead. But now I've addressed most of the main forms, and then I can move on from here. So now we did our reference illustration. Now we're going to move on to our from memory illustration. So what you can do is simply just flip over your page. Now I can't see either of them, and I'm going to try to draw from memory about 4 minutes and draw this illustration. So from what I remember, as I noted that there was a specific angle going from his head to his tail, and then he was really round. And his head was also quite round, but it was more flat at the top, as I recall. And then it sort of came out like that round very round. Okay. And then he had a small little beak and his eye. Okay. Now, from his big belly, his tail followed that line. And then we had his wings sort of came out from the center of his body. That, from what I recall. And I think his head was a little flatter than that. Okay. And tail feathers coming out. Again, there was an overlap here and his legs were nice and thin coming out at slightly different angles. And he had longer feathers. I remember the feathers at the bottom sort of follow this direction, and he was sitting on a rock. And there was shading here. Shaded sort of like a, you know, sphere because he is very round round pudgy bird. And his eye. Kids back more at the angle with everything else. There we go. I'll just put in a little more shading there. Okay, so I'm going to stop it there, and then I'm going to reveal the other side and see what I did, what I did wrong, and I'm going to reflect and correct it. All right. So bringing back my reference picture, and I'm going to switch to a different color pen. And then, honestly, looking at my reference picture and looking at my illustrations, it looks pretty good. One thing that I do notice with the wings here is actually I made them quite round, and I think they tapered off a little narrower and had a really sharp angle that sort of follow this line. And his tail feathers, they were a little thinner as well. So here, Okay. That's where I could have corrected it a little more and they ended there. I did pretty good. He does have the bulging belly, but I see also here, it connects more. If I were to redraw this really quick with the shapes, I would say that I have to make sure this is more connected here to the bird. And then there's sharper angle here. This is a narrower angle like that, and that's more the shape of the bird that I see. So I had to sharp angle, that's not right. I need it more like that. Those are the things that I'm noting. The beak, I feel is still a big, it should be thinner and longer that a little than the eye placement is pretty good. I think it could have been a little flatter near the back. Like that. Yeah. That's a nice curve there. And these wings. These wings they went down and then they poked out and went straight and then it came up a bit, like that. Then there was a second tail feather. Again, it was thinner. These are the notes that I'm sort of making for myself. The angles, the proportions, where the placement of the wings are, and in comparison. I don't say, I did relatively good in comparison with other drawings that have done in the past. But now I'm just noting all these little things that I missed. And by doing this exercise, especially doing this reflect and correct and noting that, I have this in my sketchbook now. So if ever I were to go back and want to draw a bird or something like that, I could just flip back to this page and just look at the things that I've noted. And since I did this with my own hand, it'll sort of retain in my visual library. So I can pull it back more often than if I never did this reflect and correct. There we go. So this is the reference blast. It's really fun to do. And if you do this over time, you're going to improve your drawing ability as also, you're going to improve your ability to observe the characteristics of the things around you and from references and just building up those simple shapes in your illustration. Yeah, find those simple shapes and then work. At adding detail later on. Again, you can go into as much detail as possible, or you can pull it back and make it as simple as possible. You can have a very sketchy style like mine, or you can try and do it very cleanly. It's definitely up to you, and it's your preference in your style, so fit it to your own desires. All right. So I'll see you in the next class. Okay. 17. Bonus 4 Sketch Blast: Hey, guys. Welcome back. In this class, I'm going to go through the sketch blast exercise. And for my sketch blast, I chose this little candle, and I'm going to use it for my sketch blast. So it's a pretty simple shape. I can tell that it's cylinder. It does have two parts, so I can actually incorporate both of these things into my sketch blast exercise and try to see what I can come up with. As I go through the process, I'm going to first look at the faces of it, what it looks from the front, bottom side, and side. Obviously, it's going to be 360 degrees, so it's going to look the same from all sides. The top and bottom might be slightly different. So I might address that, and then I'll go into more perspective. All right. So I'm going to set my timer. To let's just do another five minute session, and I'll get going. I'm just looking at it front on and what I can see if it's front on, well, it's pretty simple. Then at the bottom, I see that it curves down, and then it flattens out and it has a little bottom piece like that. The top, it has the lid on top and really that's what it looks like to me. Now if I look for a at the top, I'll just draw a simple circle and then it has some writing in there. The bottom, it might look a little different. So I have that, and then I have to be careful and I'll try and draw the bottom. I got my faces down. It's pretty simple. Whenever you're looking through your sketch blast, try to find the faces and try to draw them out in a flat plane, and then we can go into more three dimension. So I'm going to hold it up slightly. I can see that the top is more of an oval. I'm going to draw a line to address the angle. I'll draw an oval for the top and then an oval for the bottom. And then I'll simply connected like that, and there's a little piece underneath, and it's round at the bottom, so I should change that. Then I'll just finish the oval there for the top. Cool. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take off the top and I'm going to try it at a different angle. For me, when I'm looking at this, it's a wider opening now. And then it's around at the bottom, I can't see the bottoms. But here, is the top, and then inside there is the candle wax, and we got the wick. Okay. All right. Let's try and change it up. Maybe I'll draw the cap now. The cap. I'm going to actually just do the front facing of the cap, looks like that, and then it goes down quite a bit, but it also has this middle section here. Let's try an angle and then has that section the protruding section, the grip, I guess, where it catches on. Okay. Then if I wanted to, I can ander shading lines to wherever. Okay Let's try at a different angle. All right. Okay. Mm. Angle. I don't see exactly what you're seeing, so yeah, I'm going to sort of just overlapping everything here. Yeah. Cool. To go back to this guy. And let's draw it at a different angle here. For me now, just sideways. A little less more of a perspective. And then we get a little bit of the candle wax in there. Then maybe I'll shade it a bit. Add some character to the illustrations a bit. Yeah. And, let's draw the top view, it's the edges the candle wax on the inside, and then the candle wick. All right. I think that's our time. Okay. So that was our sketch blast exercise. Just 5 minutes, I was able to go through a few different variations of the illustration or of the subject, which is this simple candle. And it's good to work through simple shapes like this for your daily exercise because they're really quick and easy to do, so they don't take more than ten or five, 10 minutes to get something down on paper. And you can also go in and you can incorporate more shading if you wanted to to add a little more dimension to your illustrations. Again, this is just for practice and it's for building up your visual reference. All right. So by doing this exercise, often, you'll get acquainted with how you can draw three dimensional forms in different ways. And by addressing the planes at first, you can sort of understand how things you haven't seen in three dimension actually could be portrayed in three dimension. Yeah, so definitely try that out, see if you can find something simple around your house, even a soda can or, you know, a book even. Draw a few rectangular prisms in three dimension, draw the planes of different objects, and see what you can come up with. If you have any little toys, those are always fun to draw and play around. If you do this project, post in the project panel, I'd love to see what you guys create, but I'll see you in the next class. Okay. 18. Bonus 5 Creativity Blast: Hey, guys. Welcome to the final exercise, the creativity blast. So in this exercise, I've actually decided to use my previous reference picture that I use for my reference blast exercise. And I'm going to use the bird and I'm going to, you know, blasted out into different versions to see what I can create. Again, these are to experiment with the forms and the structure and to see how far you can push creatively this illustration. Then from there, if you wanted to actually go into detail, you can circle the concept that you really enjoy doing and you can take it into an actual sketchbook and you can refine it and illustrate it how you will. But first, it's good to just explore and experiment with the shapes. So let's jump bred in. The first thing that I'll do is I'll just draw a little bird in the middle, noting the shapes. So there's a big circle. He has his head there, his beak, his feet and his tail. I'm just blocking it out in simple forms like that. And maybe his eye. Okay. So from there, I'm going to start blasting out and experimenting with the shapes, proportions sizes and see what I can create trying to retain that this is still a bird. Okay? So I'm going to set my timer. I'm just going to do maybe a five minute exercise, and let's blast off. So I'll start by drawing a line, spoking out. And I'm going to start by increasing some of the contrast. So the first shape, the big shape. And then I want a really big body, and then I'm going to take this head, and I'm going to make it really small like that. I think that'll be pretty funny. If I see a bird like that, and then a little tiny tail feather. A nice fat little bird. Let's do the opposite. Let's take this round body, and I'm going to make a really big head. Again, sticking with this style. Push the legs maybe a little longer, think that? Then maybe have a big eye. See that. I'm taking what already exists, and I'm just pushing and pulling it in various ways to try to create something a little more unique. Let's do another one. Big circle. I'll do a little head like that. Maybe a really long beak. Maybe a long legs. Okay. Let's try. Let's make them even round or really round and squish this up against make those wings really small those legs tiny tail feather. Like that. Pudgy bird. The breast does come out a little more in the bird. I'm just taking note of that. So I think I want to push that a little bit and pull the head back. Maybe more streamline him. Push the breast and Okay. Okay. I'm always looking back and I'm referencing the shapes there first. As you can see, I've created already five different variations of this bird in various ways. Yeah, just pushing and pulling it to see what I can come up with. Start with the head. I'm going to make a really big eye in a really small beak. I like the line at the back. I could just go straight this time. And then Okay. See those wings. Okay. I like that one. One is a fun one. I do like the big eye, so let's push this out a bit. Let's go even with the eye and smaller with the beak. Let's do some small wings for this guy. Sappy wings. Okay. Yeah, let's try even more exaggerated version of this guy. Let's make him maybe have a bigger. But really. Okay. Cool. Is interesting. Okay. All right. There we go. That was my creativity blast exercise. I took my simple forms from my basic illustration of the bird, and I really tried to push and pull the proportions. However, each one, it does resemble a bird or the bird that I illustrated a little bit. Obviously, we can take any of these a little bit further, shade them appropriately, round off more of the edges. Make it more realistic. But the point is to go through as many versions as possible in that time and see where you can push and pull and what works and what doesn't work. All right. So when we do this often, we can take our illustration to the next level, creating more unique illustrations and just having fun in the process. I really enjoy doing this with just simple objects, like even mugs or you know, taking the basic structures of cars and pushing their proportions to see what I can create. You can try them at different angles. You can try them at different shapes instead of the bird being a circle, we could have tried it, pushing it to be more of a blocky bird like that, pushing the angles like that, but still having the same key components that make up the bird itself, right? And then maybe a triangle like that. So again, you don't have to limit yourself to, you know, saying that it has to fit proportionally. You can be as creative as you want. Again, like I said, in the class, if you wanted to turn this bird into a rocket ship, turn it into a rocket ship, have fun, as long as it still reads like a bird. This is what you're experimenting with. You're pushing your current illustration past what you thought was possible and having a creativity blast. All right. I had a blast teaching this class and I hope that you've enjoyed the class and learned something from it, something that you can apply in your creative practice. I really hope going forward, you can experiment with your own creative workouts and see what works for you and build a creative habit that will last for a long time and increase your creative potential. I'll see you next time. Okay.