Artist Spotlight
Experience Living Out Loud with Canadian artist Violette through this engaging series of visual journaling, art, and writing projects based on her workshops and book Journal Bliss: Creative Prompts to Unleash Your Inner Eccentric. Engage creatively in journal writing, doodling, collage, painting, altered art, and mask making 'to release the creative spirit within' while enjoying a wealth of wisdom and affirming creativity tips weaved throughout the process.
Violette Interview | Symbolic Stories | Doodling | Visual Journaling | Mask Making | Altered Journal | Creative Spirit Doll | Collage Play Cards | Altered Purse | Collage Globe | Painted Namaste Sign
Advice for Writers
By Deborah Herman
If you have decided to pursue writing as a career instead of as a longing or a dream, you might find yourself focusing on the goal instead of the process. When you have a great book idea, you may envision yourself on a book-signing tour or as a guest on a talk show before you've written a single word. It's human nature to look into your own future, but too much projection can get in the way of what the writing experience is all about. The process of writing is like a wondrous journey that can help you cross a bridge to the treasures hidden within your own soul. It is a way for you to link with God and the collective storehouse of all wisdom and truth, as it has existed since the beginning of time.
Creative Careers Interviews
By Molly J. Anderson-Childers
Abby Connors' creative journey has been a circuitous route, a twisting and turning road to her dreams. She began her career as a music teacher, soon changing her focus to help children with special needs. After going back to school to become a school psychologist, she had trouble finding a position in her chosen field and worked a miserable office job. Just when things were at a low point, she discovered she loved teaching movement and music to children through a community education program. The rest, as they say, is history.
DaVinci's Genius Habits
By Linda Dessau
Davinci knew his body was a strong house for his creativity and took care of it by practicing the cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise. DaVinci believed that we should accept personal responsibility for our health and well-being. Self-care requires two basic beliefs.
Guided Imagery
By Molly Childers & Chris Dunmire
The importance of play is tantamount to learning for children — but what role does play have in an adult life? Feeling stuck? Muses on strike? Doldrums got you down? This guided meditation will reconnect with your inner child when you're feeling stuck as you enter the Forest of the Lost.
The Nine Modern Day Muses
By Jill Badonsky, MEd
Arnold, the Muses Bodyguard, protects you from all of the adversaries of the creative process — the traitors to your unfolding as a creative possibility in self-realized splendor. Arnold protects you from adversaries of the creative process. The bodyguard is a spirit in defender form. He takes this form because it gives you an image to conjure up when you come face to face with those forces that stop you from finding and acknowledging creative fulfillment. He reminds you that you have power inside of you and that to give that power away to others by putting their opinions ahead of your own is a crime of unnecessary defeat.
Creativity & Inspiration
By Tom Evans
Most people never give their thoughts a second thought. This is a shame as what you think and how you are thinking fundamentally affects the world around you. Just imagine if your day could be full of brilliant ideas and inspirations that made you healthier, wealthier and wiser. For most people, life just gets in the way of even contemplating that this could happen. Our thoughts are consumed by getting the kids to school, 'imagining' a confrontation with someone at work or worrying about how to make ends meet. This series will take you through a process of how to change the way you think so your mind works to your advantage and you are not a slave to your thoughts.
Artful Project Prompts
By Violette
This is a fun project if you want to resurrect an old purse and exercise your creative juices! You can put almost anything onto your purse as long as you use the proper adhesive and numerous coats of Mod Podge and varnish. Bonus project: How to create a Warm and Fuzzy Box to remind yourself of how your creativity has touched others.
Inspiring Creativity
By Rick Benzel
Using rows and columns to move through gridlock. When getting stuck involves indecision or an inability to choose from among what seem to be too many good ideas, the best solution may be the Matrix Approach. This solution is based on resorting to logic to evaluate your ideas and choose the best one according to a set of criteria you develop.
Creative Writing Prompts
By Bonnie Neubauer
The touches of slang or lingo added to your dialogue and narrative to make your writing sound more realistic. Here’s a chance to try your hand at some Lingo-istics. Write a thirty-second radio commercial to sell a remedy for writer’s block. Make sure you use lots of writer’s lingo to show that you understand the craft and can relate to the challenges your audience is facing. Write a commercial that would make you want to buy the remedy, too. If you ever find yourself faced with a bit of a block, pull out this commercial and "sell" yourself the remedy.
Autumn Writing Prompts
By Chris Dunmire
Going back to school. Harvest time. Colorful falling leaves. Corn mazes, acorns, pumpkins, scarecrows, Halloween and Thanksgiving. In the Midwest, Autumn is the time of the year when cooler temperatures sweep in over summer's waning heat and the growing season comes to full fruition before winding down to dormancy. Fall officially begins in September and runs through October, November, and into December, when the seasonal change next morphs into winter. Inject some seasonal inspiration into your creative writing with these fall-themed writing prompts, photos, and printable projects and reflect on the meaning of the season to capture the transforming magic in the air for this colorful, transitioning space in the year.
Writing from the Deeper Self
By Naomi Rose
Creativity often seems to be viewed as the ability to come up with a lot of out-of-the-box ideas ~ a brainstorm of ingenuity, a mental agility. And while it can include this, of course, creativity is so much more than this. It is, at its essence, a soul-thing. And since this is so, everyone has the capacity to open to and cultivate it, if they are called to. But like many realities of our deep nature, this can be invisible to people about themselves, and it also can be invisible to a larger culture ~ such as our own. And the effects and side-effects of this neglect can be far-reaching, even if we are not consciously aware of it.
Premiums and Printables
By Chris Dunmire
Did you know memory-boosting exercises help improve brain function and positively impact your creative ability as you age? That's why so many sage people are addicted to puzzles like word searches and Sudoku! Here's a playful way to exercise your memory and boost your brainpower: Play my Tree-mendous Memory! game. It comes in two editions: Fall and Spring and can be downloaded in four different styles.
Art Perspectives
By Chris Dunmire
In my art appreciation class I was given the task to compare and contrast two pieces of famous art. Critera included viewing one piece in person at an art gallery and another online and report my subjective findings on the visual elements, principles of design, and differences of my experience viewing the art in each way. For my in-person piece, I went to Chicago's Art Institute to see Georges Seurat's iconic painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Next, I found Constantin Brancusi's cherished series and piece, Bird in Space online.
Inner Voices of Creativity
By Anne Marie Bennett
Spend some time journaling with your own inner voices today. What is each one telling you about how you need to spend your time in the next few weeks? Can you tell which ones are speaking the truth and which ones are simply old recordings that you don't need anymore? Make a SoulCollage® card to honor one of the parts of you that love the holidays.
Fostering Creativity
By Abby Connors
Picasso famously stated, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Anyone who lives or works with young children knows they truly are artists, buzzing with creativity, filled with wonder, curiosity, and fresh new ideas. Every child is creative, but too many children lose some or most of their creativity as they grow to adulthood.
Visual Journaling
By Violette
Who doesn't love to doodle? How many times have you sat at your desk or kitchen table during a long phone call, pen in hand, and wound up with some pretty phantasmagorical doodles? Now don't tell me you can't draw or doodle — of course you can! Your doodles can be windows to your soul. When you doodle absentmindedly, you relinquish control of your left brain and allow your right brain to take over. That's when the magic happens. Doodling while you are sitting in a classroom or meeting, talking on the telephone or waiting in a waiting room is a good start.
Creativity & Spirituality
By Jan Phillips
We're like caterpillars getting close to the Great Transformation. In preparation for its metamorphosis, the caterpillar eats 100 times its weight, falls asleep, and then forms a chrysalis. When the first imaginal cells of the butterfly begin to form themselves, the immune system of the caterpillar tries to fight them off. The immune system fails, and the caterpillar cells become the soup that nourishes the emerging butterfly.
