Die Magie der Ideenbücher: Sammle deine kreativen Inspirationen

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Looking for inspiration when you are stuck in a creative block can be daunting. Scrolling through Pinterest or Instagram in search of new ideas may seem like a good solution. However, feeding yourself with images that others created makes it that much harder for you to try and come up with something original and uniquely yours. What is more, you can get easily discouraged by all the talent out there and it can dampen your spirit even more. What if I told you that there is a way for you to cultivate your own ideas and get access to an endless source of inspiration? What if you could add just one tool to your arsenal to deepen your creative practice and get rid of artist's block once and for all? Hi. My name is Ewa Rosa and I'm an illustrator, embroidery artist, and Top Teacher here on Skillshare. I started my first idea book over 20 years ago, and I've been keeping one ever since. So what is an idea book? Well, it's a treasure trove containing all your great ideas and inspirations, gathered in one place so you can access them easily whenever you start working on a new project. Snippets of dreams, overheard conversations, fragments of books, and beautiful plants you see during a nature walk. All these things can feed your imagination and become a unique source of inspiration for your art, filtered through the lens of your own experience and sensitivity. You just have to tune into the world around you, observe it with curiosity, and record all the gems you see, hear, feel, and smell. Collected over the weeks, months, and years, these bits of inspiration turn into a vast repository of amazing ideas you can turn into reality one by one. The more you use your idea book and add to it, the more you get to know yourself as an artist. It can help you maintain a consistent creative practice, develop your style and artistic voice, and simply derive more joy from making art. Keeping your own idea book means having inspiration at your fingertips anytime you need it. This class is for all the creatives out there, whether you're an illustrator, a writer, a photographer, or a crafter. You will find immense value in gathering your inspirations consistently. We will talk about looking for ideas, capturing them as they come to you, and transferring them into one safe place. I will show you how to fill your idea book and how to use it. By the end of this class you will have all the knowledge you need to start your own creative idea book that will serve you for years to come. Sounds good? So let's dive in. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Creative idea book is a very personal thing, so I don't expect you to share the content of your spreads unless you want to. However, I would love for you to take a photo of your journal or a sketchbook you have chosen for this purpose and upload it to the gallery. Embellish the cover first, if you like, and share a few words about what kind of creative ideas you will be gathering there. Maybe you are working on developing your art career and you will be capturing ideas for your portfolio pieces, or perhaps you're a surface pattern designer and you will be collecting pattern ideas there. I would love to know! So pick your notebook and start gathering your precious ideas today. 3. Looking for Creative Ideas: [MUSIC] Creative ideas are all around you. You just have to learn to notice them, tune in to them, and listen carefully. The more you observe the world and yourself, the more ideas will come to you. There is an abundance of them, and your spring of inspiration will never dry out if you learn to nourish it by consistently feeding your imagination and developing a regular art practice. Ideas can come to you in your sleep and during your weekly supermarket trips, while you are in the shower and when you are visiting an art museum. Everything can be a source of inspiration. You can write down snippets of your surreal dreams and turn them into illustrations or stories. You can jot down fragments from books that stimulate your imagination or even quotes you'd like to letter and illustrate in the future. A story from a newspaper can give you an idea for a whole novel. You can observe the shapes of leaves and flowers in a garden, and turn them into a textile pattern. You can analyze the works of your favorite artists and take notes on motifs and techniques you like the most. You can sketch ideas for drawings, including composition, colors, and medium you plan to apply in a particular artwork. You can gather textures, patterns, and color palettes to use in your future projects. If you are into embroidery like me, you can create a stitch sampler or sketch ideas for your hoops and plan which thread colors you will use. Basically, all that you see, hear, read, or even feel and smell can be turned into art. There's so much beauty and magic in the world that surrounds us. Inspiration is at your fingertips. All you have to do is to reach for it. [MUSIC] 4. Capturing Your Creative Ideas: To have a prolific creative practice and grow as an artist, you need to get into a habit of recording your ideas and storing them in a safe place and that means outside of your brain. How many times have you had a great idea come to you right after you put your head down on the pillow? How many times have you told yourself oh, I will write it down in the morning and poof, it escaped your memory just like that? Inspired ideas are like butterflies. They are fleeting. You need to catch them and either use them right away or tuck them away somewhere safe for the future. So get into a habit of capturing inspirations as they come to you. Keep a pen and a notebook on your nightstand. Have a tiny sketchbook with you wherever you go. Scribble notes on your phone app, take photos or even make little drawings on a napkin. Creativity is a lifelong journey. An idea you have today may turn into an art project five years from now. So when a treasure like that falls into your lap, don't waste it. Write it down and make space in your brain for new inspirations. Because you can be sure the more ideas you capture, the more new ones will come to you. 5. Filling Your Idea Book: [MUSIC] Capturing your ideas consistently is half of success. For this system to work, you also need to get into a habit of transferring all those scattered notes into your idea book, so you won't lose them and you will be able to easily review them in the future. You can do it a couple of times a month, once a week, or even more often depending on your schedule. But don't treat it as a chore. Make a ritual out of it. A pleasurable session with tea, candles, and something sweet to bite perhaps? When you realize how useful and beneficial this tool is to your creative practice, you will actually start craving these moments, knowing that gathering ideas is a part of your creative process, and it helps you grow as an artist. There are tons of ways in which you can fill your idea book. You can simply jot down or sketch your ideas as they come to you at random, filing one page after another. You can create weekly spreads with all your ideas from that week put onto one spread with notes, little drawings, and found objects like flowers or leaves that inspired you. This way, you will be able to get back in time and see what got your creative juices flowing in July, or what were you interested in last spring. You can also design collections of ideas and put them on separate spreads. Here, I'm gathering ideas for florals and leaves, for example. And here are my spreads with all kinds of ocean waves. Here I'm jotting down all my weird dreams. I don't worry about leaving a specific amount of blank pages to fill on one topic. I just get back to one spread and add to it until it's full. Then I simply start another one on the next available free spread in my idea book. Spreads like that become very handy serving you as an evergreen source of inspiration. Whenever I work on a seascape, let's say, I visit these pages to pick some wave designs or combine a couple of them and create something entirely new. If you don't have enough time to rewrite all your notes, you can simply glue scraps of paper into your idea book. The same goes for quick sketches. You don't have to redraw them from scratch if you don't want to. Just stick them to a page in your idea book with some washi tape, and you are done. And speaking of not having enough time, let's take a minute to talk about decorating your spreads. In short, you don't have to do it. Sure, you can make your idea book look really pretty and magical, almost like an art journal full of collage and mixed media pieces. But you can also simply jot down your ideas, make quick pencil sketches, and that's it. Just makes sure you will be able to decipher your own scribbles later on. The primary purpose of an idea book is to be a useful tool. So don't get bogged down by embellishing every page if you don't have time for it. This is precisely why I was never able to keep a bullet journal. Inspired by all those gorgeous spreads you can see on Instagram and YouTube, I wanted mine to look just as pretty, but it was simply unsustainable for me to put so many hours a week into creating a spread that will serve me for a week or a month only. It's different for me when it comes to this idea book. As this is an evergreen source that I will be using for years to come, I feel motivated to keep it pretty and inspirational. Still, when life gets crazy, I just make sure to capture the ideas and I pass on creating elaborate spreads. In other words, make this tool work for you and not the other way around. It is supposed to make your art practice easier, not to add another chore to your to-do list. 6. Using Your Idea Book: [MUSIC] So how do you actually use your idea book once you already have it? Well, you browse through it often to fuel your creative practice with fresh and unique inspirations. Whether you are working on a specific project or you're looking for inspiration for a new one, pull out your book and see what treasures are awaiting here there. You can search for a specific thing you know you put there or just skim over the pages, pick something that random, and get to work. This method works great especially when you feel stuck and uninspired. All these gems you have gathered over the weeks, months, and years become really handy in such situations. A funny dream you had on Tuesday, shapes of beautiful flowers you've seen in a botanical garden during your holidays, the lovely color palette you decided to capture last year, all these random bits can spark your imagination and get your creativity going. So let's see how this works. A few months ago, I had a dream about the moon that went down from the sky to rest comfy on a meadow and he wasn't too eager to come back to work. So I took this idea and decided to use this color palette and some of these floral shapes and I also used patterns I saved on this spreads to depict different kinds of grass. Here's what I came up with eventually. This artwork looks the way it looks because I had all these different bits and pieces of inspiration at hand and I decided to mix them up creating something that is very much my own. 7. Final Tips: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this class inspired you to create your own magical treasure trove full of creative ideas that will serve you for years to come. If you prefer, you can keep separate books for your writing and craft ideas for example. Personally I like to keep everything in one place because this helps me connect the creative dots in fresh and sometimes unexpected ways. An idea for drawing can translate into an embroidery project. A funny illustration can spark an idea for a short story or I may decide to illustrate my dream and embellish it with embroidered elements. When I keep everything in one book and I browse through it often, I remind myself of all the possibilities that await me and it's pretty exciting. However, if you like to keep things more organized, by all means separate your creative endeavors. Remember that there are no rules when it comes to idea books. They're to help you and inspire your practice, so it's a very personal tool and every idea book will look different. So you do you. If you enjoyed this class, it would mean a lot to me if you'd leave me a review. And of course, don't forget to share a photo of your idea book in a project gallery. If you are looking for more inspiring tools to help you grow your creative practice, be sure to check my class on Pocket-Sized Creativity. It will be perfect for you if you want to create consistently but you don't have much time on your hands. And if you want to stay tuned for my next classes, follow me here on Skillshare. So, happy creating and see you next time!