Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, welcome to my studio. I'm Noah Scalin, I'm an artist and co-creator of creative sprint, along with my sister, Mica Scalin. Our art and innovation consulting firm, another limited rebellion, has partnered with clients such as Old Navy, Goodwill, and Capital One. My artwork has been shown around the world, including in Newyork city's Times Square, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. I'm also the creator of the Webby Award winning scholar day project, which began as a daily creative practice to get myself out of a creative rut. I was doing a full time creative professional job and suddenly I wasn't inspired anymore. I didn't like the work I was doing and I felt stuck. I decided to do something about it, and what I did was made a skull piece of art every single day for a year. What happened after I made a skull every single day for a year? Well, it changed my life and my career. I ended up getting book deals. I got to travel the world, giving talks. I ended up getting shows in galleries and museums and I got a new career as a consultant around creativity. But the best thing that came out of it, honestly was that I learned how creativity worked. In this class series, I'm going to teach you how to get yourself unstuck and expand the many possibilities within your own art-making process, based on the things I learned from my own experiences. Whether you are a beginner in your field or a well seasoned professional, we can all use a creative boost now and again. I always considered myself a creative person growing up and I was lucky enough to have a full time creative career, starting shortly after I got out of school, first working for others and eventually running my own business. But frankly, I never really knew where my creativity came from until it was gone. It took going through my skull a day process of daily creative practice, to discover the surprising, often counter-intuitive ideas about how creativity really works. These are the ideas that I'm going to cover in this class to help you grow your own creative capacity. I'll take you through a six-part creative sprint that features exercises to embody the spirit of these concepts. You can do them daily for six days in a row or just split them up and do them at your own pace. The key is to get started and see where the journey takes you. There's even a bonus activity to help you bring the things you learn here with you into your future work. Are you ready to get inspired and develop some exciting new opportunities for yourself? Let's try it.
2. Dream Small: Let's start with our first theme, which is dream small. I realize that sounds pretty counter-intuitive and honestly, all of the stuff we're going to talk about here may feel that way, but that's the reality of how creativity works. It doesn't work, how other things work. What does it mean to dream small? Well, a lot of people get asked to dream big all the time. It's great to have big ideas, big dreams, and think about the future, but it can also be extremely overwhelming and frees us in place and stop us from doing anything at all. Dream small is really about taking that big picture and turning it into a really small picture. Taking the macro and making it micro so that we can move forward. What I needed to do was take a tiny step to lower the bar, lower the barrier to entry so that I could get moving, going from stasis to motion. Once I took a tiny little step, made one little orange paper skull. Well, then I could do something, I could make progress, I can move forward, and I could build some other steps and that's when I started making more and more things and getting more and more opportunities. It took the first tiny step though to get out of being stuck.
3. Dream Small Activity: What's our first activity? All we want you to do is work with the letters of your name. It could be your first name or last name or both, or even at a middle name into it. My name is Noah Scalin, and you can see the letters in my name. What I'm going to do is just rearrange those letters and see what else I can find out of them. Look, here's a bunch of really funny stuff that's in my name. Lash An Icon, Ash Can Lion Chain, Salon, Alas, No Inch sounds like a Shakespearean play line. Finally, Nacho Snail, which is honestly my favorite of all time. You can do this easily by writing your own name on a piece of paper and scrambling the letters. Or you can cut them out even and start pushing them around like Scrabble tiles or even use some scrabble tiles if you have them. Once you find something really fun in there, and honestly you don't have to use every letter. Then you can get to work. Now, what are you going to do with those funny words? You can write a poem, you can draw a picture, you can make a collage, anything at all as possible, but don't make it too big. Remember that idea of dream small, come up with something that you can do quickly, experimentally. This isn't about getting it right. It's not about being perfect. What did I do with not just now? Well, I loved the idea of a not just now, but what could that be? One of the things that got me thinking of was, well, just a plain old orange not Joe chip. That counts as a nacho. When I saw that nacho chip, I thought, I know that looks a lot like a snail shell. Maybe it does to you. I don't know so I put the two together by drawing a little picture of a snail and sticking that actual nacho chip right on top and taking a photo. There was my result. Let's do it again and we'll do it together this time. I'm going to pick another one on my list and we're going to make something. Let's see what happens. I've got to last no inch on. I grabbed a ruler at first and couldn't figure out what to do because it has an inch on it. Then I thought maybe I could make a picture where somebody is holding a ruler up. But then I look to my drawer where my other rulers were and I found all these cool like templates and triangles. Then I discovered these old tools that are for drawing curves. I haven't used these in forever. I don't remember if I used them very much when I had them. Let's see what I can do with those. Those are cool. I thought, what I'll do is I'll put a piece of paper down to make a background for this. I like making non-permanent art. I'm just going to just not even glue anything down and just see what happens. This looks like a hairdo to me. It's going to be like a body of something, an eye over here. It's got, it looks like a Puffin with a wing maybe, like tail. What is this creature? This is like a foot. I like that. I don't know what that's supposed to be. Kind of a foot and a tail. A weird squirrel. They need something else. Let's see triangle that work with after that. What else could I use? Letter ruling. I need something else. I'm going to find some wire or something, or I'll see, and play with anything on this draw in awhile. I feel I got to make a good pun, but I'm not getting any pun out of this. Has to be disappointed in something like snow inch. Need this to be armed. It's investigating something. It's an acorn rain like little. It doesn't have that great hairdo. I don't even know what that is anymore. That's cute squirrel tail. Squirrel have, I mean like that. I don't know, It's making me laugh. That works. I got to find some other materials to work with them. It's one last piece, what could it be. Look what I found. This is a tape measure and it's in centimeters. There's our pun. Heavy magnet on the side of the table here I'll use to, less no inch, just centimeters. Is it done? It's pretty funny to me. I don't know. That's the good part. Done is good. We'll take it.
4. Make Friends with Limitations: The next theme is limitations are your friends. Which might sound weird because it seems like we need freedom to be creative, not limitations. But what would happen if somebody gave you all the time in the world to do whatever you wanted? Well, I know for myself, it freezes me in place. I can't think of anything to do, I'm not inspired. It turns out that we need limitations, we need things to push off of to get us inspired. When I made my skull-a-day project, I had lots of limitations. I was going to make a skull. I was going to make it once a day, every day for a year, and I was also going to make it out of very specific materials and I was boxing myself in. But the great thing is those walls that I created, allowed me to push off and move forward with creativity. Without those walls, I wasn't going anywhere. Once you start practicing limitations, you can start identifying them in all sorts of situations and if you don't have them, you can put them in place on purpose. That's really what a creative spirit is about: creating a set of limitations using prompts to get you inspired.
5. Make Friends with Limitations Activity: Our next activity is to work with the pieces of the classic tangram puzzle. If you're not familiar with it, tangram was created possibly over 1,000 years ago in ancient China. It made its way to Europe and America in the 1800s, where it was extremely popular. Children and adults have been playing with it ever since. It's deceptively simple, they're just seven geometric shapes and traditionally the game is played by looking at silhouettes of images and trying to figure out how to reproduce them. However, this time we're going to flip that around and you're going to make your own original images using all seven pieces. We've provided a template so that you can cut it out and make it yourself. You can use paper or cardboard or wood or anything else you'd like. Once you have the pieces cut out, you can make one image or many, you can turn it into a game with your family or friends, see if other people can reproduce the things you create. The important part is discovering all of the limitless possibilities that exist within a set of limitations, just seven pieces. Let's try it out. I made the classic tangram shapes using the pattern that we provided. I traced it onto a piece of mat board I just had in my studio. I used an exacto knife to cut it out, it's not perfect, which is fine, it'll do what I needed to do. You can make it any size, this is large, you can make it a little smaller if you want, or even bigger. One thing I will say a little caveat, this piece here is the only piece that is not symmetrical and so sometimes you might want to flip it over to use it, and in this case, that's a different color. I'm going give myself the additional challenge of not flipping it all over only for aesthetic purposes but you are welcome to flip it over and color both sides of your tangram pieces. This is the original square shape that it comes in and I'm just going to play and see what happens. The goal is to make something that uses every single piece, every time you create something using this, so give yourself that challenge to really follow that limitation because it's pretty easy just to maybe use one or two of them. I'm just separating them out. Look what I've got. It doesn't seem like too much yet but let's see what happens. I'm just going to play and see what I get out of it. See what the shapes inspire. See if it makes me think of anything. Could just be an abstract form. I was seeing something, but then it changed when I turn that around. That's interesting too. Look at that. I think it's a bird, like dipping down to grab something. Like it's going to fly down to grab something out of the water. Let's see what comes next. Looks like a face. It's a nose. Maybe the hair is flowing off into this with a very pointed chin. I've got two. We are now flying things for me there, look at that, it's an airplane, but I have this block. What do I do with this? Not quite what I wanted. Not everyone works. Look at that. This one's subtle, I think cool. See what you think. Taken it in a different place. Negative space, it's the great pyramids of Egypt. That's a good discovery. Look at that. I love it. There you go. Weird zigzag. That's it.
6. Perfection Is Overrated: Our next theme is perfection is overrated, I'm a perfectionist, so I should know. It doesn't matter if you don't consider yourself a perfectionist. The reality is that we all have something called preciousness, which is the feeling about the things that we make, that their precious to us. But the problem with this is that we tend to then want to really hold onto those things. Being that kind of precious or perfectionist about our work really stops us from seeing new opportunities by experimenting and trying things out. When I was doing my Scala Day Project, I was often worried about how people might perceive what I was making because it wasn't the best stuff I'd ever made. It was impossible, in fact, to do the best thing ever when I was only doing it in one day and certainly doing it every single day, I couldn't top myself or make better work. It was really about my own practice, but also discovering that sometimes when I put out my first drafts that people really liked them, and that there were things that I didn't like that other people liked which got me inspired. That's another way to think about this, that a creative sprint is really just first drafts. These are the things that will allow you to then try stuff that you could come back to and refine and make better. You might make something on one day that you love, but if you don't, that's okay too. Getting past this point of wanting things to be right will really allow you to grow and learn how to be more creative on a regular basis.
7. Perfection Is Overrated Activity: The next activity is to make something without looking at it. I hope that's intriguing and maybe even your wheels are turning already. There are a lot of ways to approach that. The important part is there's no way to get it right. Which is a great way to let go of that preciousness and perfectionism we have about our work. I'm going to show you one technique I love to use. It's called blind contour drawing. What's great about it is that anybody can do it and someone who's never drawn or is scared of drawing can try it out and someone who's feels proficient at drawing can still get the benefits from doing it. It's pretty straightforward. What it involves is using any drawing surface and any drawing tool, but the key is that you're not going to look at the surface while you're working. What do you need to do is set yourself up where your paper or notebook is on a table in front of you and then rotate your chair away from it so that your drawing hand is on the surface, but your face is looking away. Then you're going to look at something and draw that thing. It could be your hand, could be someone else's face or an object, or even an image in a magazine or a book. While you're drawing, you're going to be using your eyes to trace the outlines of the object, the interior and exterior elements very slowly. Your pencil or pen or marker, et cetera, will stay on the paper the whole time. Don't lift it up because you're not going to know where you are anyway. You're going to be drawing and moving. Moving your pencil or pen, et cetera, while your eye moves, following the shapes. Then when you're done, take a look back. Don't cheat and look while you're working. Be surprised at what happens at the end. It can be a real delight. What you've ended up with afterwards could be a finished piece of work. It could be a sketch that gives you other ideas. It could be something you would come back to in color in, or add things to, or collage with. There's a lot of great things that come out of it. It's a really simple practice that you can do almost anywhere, as long as you have access to something to write on and something to write with. I'm going to do this a few times. The first time I'm going to draw my hand and an interesting curl up position. I'm going to be looking at my hand, not at the paper. I'm just going to start somewhere down here and use my eyes to follow the shapes and looks in crannies and crevices and just draw until I've drawn all of them. I've done this a bunch. One of the things I learned is that, to take my time with where things are located. We're not trying to reproduce it exactly in terms of what the finished product is going to look like. We're just trying to capture every little nuance and detail that our eyes can see and really just give it the patience. I'm moving pretty quickly here. Again, only looking at my hand and not the paper and not lifting my pen off the paper so that I'm just drawing one continuous line. Sometimes I'm even closing one eye to make sure that I am not getting confused about what I'm seeing, sometimes with both eyes I'm seeing stereotypically. I'll get two different views of something. But honestly with this drawing, it doesn't really matter because if you end up with something that looks really unusual, it's okay. It's going to happen either way. My goal is to just try to capture every little line and crack, any weird little shape that I encounter. Hands are actually notoriously difficult to draw. But when you are not worrying about the end product or thinking of him even as hands, I'm thinking of this just as shapes, lines, you might be really delighted to discover the thing that happens when you're done. Again, this is not about drawing the right thing, it's about drawing the thing that you're seeing in the moment. I just find like when I look at these, give this to my students to do. I loved the results no matter what people, however they create them, how are they think about them? I just find them all delightful to look at. I just think that the quality we have, is a natural grace of those lines is very satisfying. Look at that, I drew a hand. I got every finger in there. Let's try it again. This time I'm going to be using a picture in a book. I'm actually put the picture out of frame so that maybe you can try to figure out what it is I'm drawing as I'm drawing it and see if you can figure it out based on what happens. We'll give it a go. Just chose this box of crayons at random and use the colors that happen to be in it. Let me just playing as I go about. What colors look nice together, should go with what I'm just experimenting. Don't really know what the goal is other than to have fun and relax, let my mind wonder.
8. Work with the Unexpected: Our next theme is Work with the Unexpected. What do playdough, posted notes, and x-rays have in common? They are the result of accidents. Scientists know that accidents can create opportunity and the same thing is true with creativity and art. How often do you make something that doesn't come out right and think, "I hate this, this is just trash. I don't ever want to see it again. Let's throw it away." I do that with my work. But if we learn to embrace those accidents as rather than mistakes, something more like unexpected results, what opportunities could be presented by them? Another way to approach this is to create opportunities for the unexpected to happen. We may not be able to actually make the unexpected since by its nature we don't expect it. One thing that helps is just getting away from your normal work area, going into a different room or going outdoors and seeing what opportunities suddenly appear because it's something new, something random, something unexpected. Or you can just make an intentional mess and see what happens.
9. Work with the Unexpected Activity: For our next activity, we are going to create the unexpected. The way we're going to do that is just to spill something. Doesn't have to be messy, though it can be, you can spill your existing art materials or you can find some random everyday material to spill. You can do it in your home or outside, and you can take spill very literally, or you could interpret it in a different way. I use this technique quite a bit with my scholar-day project, and I found it was a great way to get out of a rut if I was using the same materials in the same way over and over, and had to deal with some new surprises that I created for myself. Let's give it a try. Today I thought I would work with some traditional artist ink in a little container. It's got a dropper in it, and I'm just going to hold the dropper over a piece of a mat board and splat. See what happens. Whoo, that looks cool just to work with mat board because it's very thick and absorbent in the way that it won't cause hopefully the final result to warp a thin piece of paper because it's so wet it might get too wobbly and it'll be hard to work with. But experiment with different techniques and different materials, I don't think I've opened this bottle in a while, so this is a good excuse to play with it. It will take a little while for this to dry, but actually, I'm going to try another thing as part of this. This is one of those reusable metal straws, and I'm going to blow on some of these little blobs of ink while they're still wet and see if I can make some little lines. This is inspired by technique kids are often encouraged to do, and also my friend Stephen Booker, who's a great artist and designer, uses to create monsters from ink spills, and his work is worth looking up. Whoo, look at that. I'm blowing from one angle so all the lines are going in the same direction. If I come to the other side and do some the other way, oops. Yes, you don't have to blow all of them if you do this technique, you can just do some of them. Cool, now my job is to figure out what to do with this. I really like what happened. I'm starting to feel like I see something this direction. What I'm seeing is like little people, like they're dancing or something. Now, I'm not a cartoonist and this is not my formal way of working and I might just try to do something different. See what happens. Actually want to drop a little more ink first, so let me do that. I'm going to give a little. Ink is very thick, it got bubbles in it. Grab a brush. Bubbles are trying to pop now. I find it very difficult for me to draw this very abstract style. What I like about a technique like this is it forces it to happen just by the nature of the drawings. Not at all what I expect to make is I didn't have any expectations with the boy. Not anything I'd ever expect to make. I'm not sure what's going on over here with this one, I wouldn't know. It's like a person on a robe, maybe it's a wizard or something conjuring up visions. That's interesting. That little person there is delightful. I think what I want to do is just that. I read a lot of comic books lately and so I'm seeing a comic book character now, walking away from a city. Are they walking? Like this very evocative though, we want to find out more about this character and this person. What's all this up here? Stars, planet, oh, yeah. You guys let's try a planet hovering above them. The alien world, yeah, let's see what that looks like. I like that I started with one thing along somewhere else, that's exactly what this technique is about. It's looked like there's a big planetoid right behind this little character that, I didn't draw, just blew into existence.
10. Expand Your Default Settings: Our next theme is expand your default settings. You might know the term default settings from your computer. It just really means that it's how things are set up to work right away. But the fact is that we have default settings in our brains as well, especially when it comes to creativity and creative problem-solving. We know the way to solve the problem, the way we've always used, and it's always worked for us. But if we're looking for something new, we can't use those old ways, so how do we get new default settings? Well, we put more tools in our toolbox to use a different metaphor. When I did my skull-a-day project, I came up with 365 new ways of solving a problem. Now I have those available to me so that anytime I encounter a situation where I need a new idea, I've actually already practiced a bunch of new ways of solving problems. Expanding your default settings is really more about creating new ways of thinking so you can approach problems in new ways whenever they happen.
11. Expand Your Default Settings Activity: For our next activity, we are going to make some poetry. I say make specifically because we are not going to write it in the traditional way. We're actually going to work with pre-existing words. There are a lot of different ways to do this. I'm going to do something called blackout poetry. I learned it from the writer Austin Kleon. If you're not familiar with it, the concept has actually been around for a few 100 years and it is well-known from the surrealist artists who did similar techniques. The way we're going to do it, is to work with a piece of preexisting text like a magazine or a newspaper, or even a page from a book that you don't mind defacing. Something with lots of words on it like this would be great. Pretty much all you do is start reading the text, looking for words that stand out to you. Circle the words you like, and then when you've got what you think is your finished poem, you get rid of all the rest of the text by blocking it out with a marker. You can do this in a simple, straightforward way or you can do things like connect the words in interesting ways: drawing arrows, or adding numbers, or even making images where the text is that you don't want to include. Let's give it a try. I have a piece of newspaper, actually, the sports section, which I am not interested in at all. I rarely get the newspaper, but one was sent to me recently, randomly, so perfect material to work with. I'm just going to work on this little section, there's a lot of words there, and see what strikes me. I'm going to circle or box the words that interest me and see if I start to get an idea as I go. Let's see. It can be individual words or little phrases that you pick out. You don't have to use all of them, but maybe just the ones that strike you. Now I'm going to have the words I definitely want. I'm actually darkening them so I can really see which ones I want to hold onto. Darkening them really gives you the ability to focus and a really nice aesthetic quality to the finished form. I want it to look finished when I'm done. I like that as the title. I mean, we could give it its own title, or use words within the poem. I don't really consider myself a poet. I find this type of work difficult, so it's a good challenge for me. Words don't have to be in order. You can change the order and use arrows to tell you which word is an extra number even. [inaudible]. I'm not leaving those last couple of words in. That was the first pass. Then you could really go in and darken it up and make it even more solid looking. You don't have to, you can stop at any point you want, just make sure it looks the way you want. You can transcribe these or you can just keep it as it is in the newspaper. You can also cut out the words that you want, that's another way to do it. I'll read you the finished result. A complete novice, banged up and learning the first skill. Natural ability is just another illness. There we go.
12. Inspiration Is Everywhere: Our final theme is inspiration is everywhere and maybe you've heard of something like that before. But the reality is that once you start practicing your creativity, you'll discover that it really is true that even the most mundane or familiar settings or materials become full of opportunity, if you train your brain to see it. One thing that's surprising to a lot of people is that creativity doesn't work the way we've been taught it works in stories. This idea of the Muse of inspiration who flies in the window and puts a light bulb over your head, or the gods on high who throw down a lightning board and kaboom, there's that great idea and all you have to do is sit and wait for it and stare into blank screen page canvas. The reality is that creativity is generated from within. It's something that we've already had within us the whole time, but we have to stoke those fires and doing things. Taking action is what allows us to discover that, to create more of that within us. It's really about taking steps forward and trying things, making stuff, working with our hands and then we can really see how inspiration truly is everywhere.
13. Inspiration Is Everywhere Activity: For our next activity, I'm going to share a technique I actually developed for myself. Many years ago, I encountered some work that my daughter made using stickers. I just thought this was delightful. She was young enough that she didn't care what the images look like. She just combine them and made these really beautiful abstract collages. I really wanted to work in that technique. One day when I was stuck creatively, I gave myself an assignment to make some art every day for 30 days about song lyrics. About a weekend, I decided to make a sticker piece based on her technique, inspired by the song, The Rainbow Connection and I made a portrait of Kermit the Frog and people loved it. It really inspired me to continue to dive in and experiment with this set of materials that I'd never worked with before. I worked with everyday material before, but not with stickers specifically. At a very base level, what I'm doing is a lot like what she did. I'm just layering stickers on top of each other and in my case, making images out of them. What we're going to do today is a simple version of what I do with my artwork. Show you some examples of it and see what you can create. This does require that you have some stickers, but a lot of people seem to have them around their house anyway. But if you don't have stickers, that's okay. You can always cut out images from magazines and do this technique that way. We've provided a template so that you can create your own image like I'm making, but feel free to make your own outlines and create your own images as well. Let's try it out. We have a printout here of the bird that we provided. I'm literally just going to start sticking random stickers onto that. I have a whole bunch of stickers. I have a lot in my collection, but hopefully you have some laying around the house, could be mailing labels even or ones that are for kids in your life if you have any or friends with any. Don't need to buy anything special for this, but you're welcome to do that too. As I mentioned, if you don't have stickers, you can use just magazines or books, cut out things. Of course I like stickers because they're already sticky, makes it easier to get them to stay in place. You can't move them around, of course, once you've done that, let's make this bird. Actually here's a start with a bird. You can have a plan of action like, I want this bird to be a certain color. You don't have to either, you can really just go crazy and put them down randomly. I think it's funny to make a bird of birds. It like a coloring book. I'm really thinking about like, how do I color it in? Stay inside the lines in this case. Because I want it to look a certain way. But you don't have to. You can do just the interior or you could do the interior and the exterior and give it a background if you want. I think the key is if you want to make details appear, it's all about contrast. Think about that as you're putting down stickers, if you want to work on certain colors. I'm just using a bunch from this one little sheet because that's nice. But I'll grab some others. The star of color to me would work maybe has an eye. There's contrast there. I'll squint on these pieces to see if the image is working the way I wanted to, looks different in photos than on the camera. That's also good to check if you get some perspective on what other people are seeing. If you don't like a part, just stick over it. Now, I choose not to cut up my stickers, but you do not have to do that. You are more than welcome to cut your stickers, do whatever you want. Now one trick I use when I'm doing my large pieces is I don't feel obliged to also worry about the edges as much because I know I'll cover them up when I made to do a background. In your background, you can keep adding elements. You can spend a lot of time on these, or you can do them quickly. It's fun doing it with family and friends. It's not a competition, so it's not about getting it right. I don't want to have a different interpretation or if working with materials. All materials are different, you get different results. I guess it's done.
