Creativity Cookies

Senses Sensation

By Dan Goodwin

As a creative artist, you experience the world through your senses, every sight, sound, scent, taste, and feeling. But because your senses are such a fundamental part of how you interact with your surroundings, it’s easy to take them for granted.

Also, everything you create is an expression through your senses, either directly (for example a vivid colourful painting that’s stimulating to look at) or indirectly (for example a passage of writing about the scents and tastes of your mother’s baking as you were growing up).

So this Creativity Cookie is about getting back in touch with your senses, and enriching your creativity as you do so.

Little Nibble:

We each have our preferred senses, but the more you can use all of yours as fully as possible, the more inspiration you’ll have in your creativity.

Go somewhere new that’s going to stimulate your senses. It can be somewhere busy and full of people, somewhere quiet and tranquil out in nature, anywhere where there are unfamiliar surroundings.

Then, spend 5 minutes focusing on each of your senses in turn, then writing down exactly what you’re experiencing through that sense.

Notice which senses you find easier to tune in with. Notice too how some things stimulate more than one of your senses and how they become intertwined.

Big Bite:

Start a “Book of Sense Sensations." This is just a notebook or sketchbook you take with you to new places and record how each of your senses are stimulated, like you tried in the exercise above.

You can either have a new page for each visit and split it into a section for each sense or divide the entire book into sections, so all of your experiences of scents are together, all of your sights are together and so on.

You can then use your book to stimulate new creative ideas, much in the same way you might use a regular Ideas Journal.

When you need a new idea to create from, skim through your Book Of Sense Sensations and pick the first description that captures your interest. Choose a creative medium and start to create from the ideas that flow from that sensory description.

The more you use the book, the more in tune you’ll become with your senses and the more naturally enriched and vivid your creative artwork will become.

Try the above exercises, then head over to CCS to share your sensory experiences and see what others have been saying: Join in on the discussion here. •

© Copyright 2008 Dan Goodwin

03/23/08