Be Creative! Adults (fun for kids, too!)

Exercises and Hands-On Projects to Inspire Creative Thinking, Imagination, and Play

By Chris Dunmire

Are you up to having some creative fun? These activities are meant to be small and easy-going to maximize your enjoyment and creative learning experience. (Think of them as snacks for a creativity break!)

Each creative activity below features recommended Materials List and Try It! steps to guide you along in either a computer or hands-on project. Note that these are simply suggested materials and methods to get you started, so feel free to improvise or improve upon any recommendations. Each project also includes a What You'll Learn review and The Next Creative Step... to encourage you to take what you've learned and apply it elsewhere. The ultimate goal with all Be Creative! projects is to enjoy an uninhibited creative process and have lots of fun!

Ready to begin? Choose an activity from the list below and get started! But wait, there's more. If you enjoy these projects, be sure see more of my fun and free projects at the Creativity Portal Playground.

Creative Art & Crafts Fun

Gum Wrapper Origami
Want to learn how to fold a shirt and pants set with your colorful Bazooka gum wrappers? Here's instructions how that can also use to fold a $1 dollar bill into a nifty dress shirt!

Popcorn Art: Fluffy Imagination Starch-Gazing
Popcorn is not just for the movies and stringing around your Christmas tree anymore. Use your cloud-gazing and imagination skills to create colorful works of art on ordinary popped popcorn.

Fun with Type and Writing

Brickstorming Your Legacy Brick
What would you write on your legacy brick in 3 lines with 14 characters each?

TypARTgraphy: Artistic Compositions with Type and Fonts
What? Artistic compositions with type? Learn how by using only the characters (letters, numbers, symbols) in a family of fonts, you can create some fontastic art.

Craft Autumn Greeting Card Poetry & Quotes
You get to download and print the blank autumn cards (with fall art on the fronts) and write the cover and inside message with poetry or quotes. Inspiring fun fall time creative writing.

Word Type: Design Meaning with Words
An experiment in nonverbal meaning. Design a word or headline to look like its real or opposite meaning.

Design a Word Search Puzzle
Remember how fun it was to find hidden words in a mess of letters? Well, now you can create your own word search or crossword puzzles.

Write the Story: Stick Figure Creativity
Can a picture really be worth 1,000 words? Test your creative writing imagination by writing what you see in these stick figure drawings. Share your creative stories in a group!

Writing & Blogging Prompts: Start Your Stories!
Are you itching to write about something for your journal or blog, but need a little help with a topic idea? Try using these writing prompt topics and words.

Download and Print Coloring Pages

Winter Snowman: Free-ze Your Creativity
Your creativity isn't frozen in time! Get our your crayons and have some childlike coloring fun!

Fall Turkey: Feathered Fun
A coloring page you're sure to gobble up!

Nit Wits PUNKin: Rebellious Gourds & Pumpkins
These Nit Wits coloring pages with Punky Pumpkins won't bore you out of your gourd!

Nit Wits Tee Time: Coloring Beyond the Greens
This Nit Wits coloring page promises a creative 'hole in one!' Don't worry about staying in the lines, that's par for the course!

Nit Wits Purrassic Park: Dinosaur Dyno-mite!
This Nit Wits coloring page will sharpen your 'extincts!' Prove to yourself that your creativity didn't go 'the way of the dinosaurs!'

Nit Wits Mirror Image: An Odd Reflection
This Nit Wits coloring page will help you to 'reflect' on how much you enjoy being creative!