Today's Creativity Reflection:
The Beauty Emerges
The world needs your creative gifts. Allow your beauty to emerge.
By Kristi Tencarre
A butterfly in flight is a beautiful sight to behold. It is calming to watch. A butterfly was made to soar. When it is fluttering in the air, it is doing what it was made to do. It is living its purpose. It reached maturity and can now bring forth life. The same is true with our art. Sarah Ban Breathnach writes, "It takes a lifetime to create the work of art for which we were born." Our whole life is preparation for the work(s) for which we were meant to create. There are many forms of creativity and many diverse paths to creation. A butterfly begins in an egg with a hard outer shell and a waxy interior that protects the egg. Not all eggs are the same shape and size. So it is with us as creative beings. We are all individuals. Our life experience determines the shape our art takes.
Transform Your Inner and Outer World Through Creative Engagement
Taming Your Outer Child
Dream House Guided Visualization
By Susan Anderson
This visualization is designed to bypass the internal gatekeeper, otherwise known as your Outer Child, the hidden barrier to achieving success. Outer’s defenses have created a veritable obstacle course to reaching your potential. One obstacle is having a low sense of entitlement. When you have an appropriate sense of entitlement, it means you feel deserving of an equal share of the rewards and benefits of life. When you feel less than entitled, Outer Child acts out your feelings of self-dismissal and unworthiness through passivity, avoidance, and underachieving.
Books & Printables
Origami Money Plant Project
By Chris Dunmire
With fake fun printable 'Cashius monetarius' seed packet! As featured in Money: Everything You Never Knew About Your Favorite Thing to Find, Save, Spend, and Covet by Sandra and Harry Chonron, this unique origami money plant makes a delightful gift to create, but hard to give away! Learn how to make this truly memorable craft with my with easy-to-follow instructions in a fully-illustrated, step-by-step 23-page project book.
Spirited Woman Q & A
Interview with Artist, Poet, and Activist Ellen Spencer
By Nancy Mills
Q. You are passionate about your art, the environment, women's health issues, and so much more. Is being passionate part of your DNA or is it part of your life's journey?
A. Being passionate is something that was passed on to me from the women in my family, but it also became my journey — as in passion for my art and the environment. It is the one word that defines my life at this point. The passion in my family started with my grandmother who was breast cancer survivor and she became passionate about life and living in the moment and she taught that to my mother. It was a very open discussion throughout my entire childhood to find out what you are good at and always stay present — that your passion was an element that would drive you throughout your life, yet it was learned behavior for us at the same time.
Writing from the Deeper Self
Rough Drafts & Revisions
By Naomi Rose
It's human to want to create something all finished, all perfect, all at once, from the outset. A flash of desire or inspiration seizes us, and we begin the lengthy process of writing a book that began in our hearts. We set out with perhaps some trepidation, but also a sense of new beginnings: a destination to be reached, and a path as yet not fully known. The strength of our desire, even despite likely internal obstacles ~ self-doubt, lack of experience of being fully encouraged, feeling vulnerable and small ~ is the "big bang" of conception, the birthing-force that brings this world-to-be onto our horizon. Did we not have this desire to bring something new into being ~ to create ~ we could not see the process through. For, as I have written so often, writing a book is a process, and it affects the writer as much as what gets written. And this process, much like gestation, labor, and birth, requires nourishment, caring, commitment, and patience for the long haul.
Creativity Coaching
Being Creative is Your Choice
By Robert Alan Black, PhD
Do you let little things stop your creativity? I can't be creative. I can't draw. I can't sing. I can't dance. I can't understand computer software. I can't. I can't. I can't. No doubt have read the quote always accredited to Henry Ford: "If you say you can or you say you can't, in either case you will be right in the end." Being creative is your choice. Yes major things or forces can stop creativity. Yet when we look at the history of invention or in general the history of new ideas we can discover that these major forces truly do not stop the devoted, committed, dedicated creation person.Fostering Creativity
Creative Arts and Creative Thinking Are Not the Same Thing!
By Abby Connors
I presented a workshop at a unique international conference, "Educating the Creative Mind," held at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. The conference was tremendously stimulating, with educators and researchers from all over the world sharing ideas. I met dancers, educational psychologists, actors, musicians, and arts educators from a variety of backgrounds, with a wide range of perspectives on arts-based education. There's so much more to "educating the creative mind" than arts education. First of all, as Dr. Howard Gardner pointed out in his keynote address at the conference, all art is not creative. In fact, much "art" in our popular culture is distressingly trite and derivative.
Write Right Now! Prompt
365 Pictures: See Today's Prompt
Art Sculpture Instruction
Innovative Wire Sculpture Workshop
By Elizabeth Berrien
Welcome to the innovative wire sculpture movement! Innovative wire sculptors invent their own new forms of wire sculpture as they explore. They take pride in being different and creating something totally new. I learned the process of innovation in 1968, from the late Kenneth G. Curran. He got me started; I have been my own teacher ever since. Using Mr. Curran's method, I invented my own innovative form of wire sculpture. As a pioneer in the field, I raised my innovative wire sculpture to museum quality standards. In 2004 I founded the worldwide guild, Wire Sculpture International, and received the prestigious Victor Jacoby Award for innovation in art. In this course I will hand on to you what I have learned from Kenneth Curran so you can be an innovative wire sculptor, too.