The New Normal

Sometimes, events in our lives change our course dramatically and unexpectedly. Tragedy, illness and death force us to try to readjust and continue. Somehow, day by day, pieces fall in place, and we find a new normal. But it needn't be something sad or unpredicted that prompts this change. Any day of our lives we…

How To Create Amazing Somethings From Virtually Nothing

A common belief amongst artists is that we don't create enough. Combine this with another often closely held belief that, unless we can dedicate hours or days at a time to creating, we'll not be able to make any worthwhile art, and we have a recipe for a miserable and frustrated artist. Fortunately, both of…

Why Your New Resolutions Are Already Failing (And What To Do Instead)

Becomes really tiresome doesn't it? That pattern of entering a new year with so much promise, so many plans for change, so much expectation... Then a week in realising that we're pretty much exactly the same people doing exactly the same things we were doing a month ago. And feeling as despondent and deflated as a…

Embracing The Experiments

As creative beings, everything we do involves changing what already exists. Nothing stays the same, and every moment is an experiment. Embrace these experiments. If we gather up the same tools, materials, thoughts and surroundings as we did a month ago, six months ago, a year ago, and sit down to make again, it will…

To The Dreamers, The Makers, And You

We need the dreamers. Those who let their imaginations tumble open the width of the horizon and the depth of the ocean's abyss. We need the makers. Those who gather up handfuls of raw materials and tease and fuse them into objects that didn't exist before. But most of all we need the artists. Those…

How To Rise And Recover From A Crash In Creativity

Whatever and however we create, all of us at times experience a lull in our creative inspiration and output. It's a natural and inevitable part of our creative cycles. But when a fleeting dip starts to feel like a bottomless, endless trough, and you start to think of yourself only as a person who used…

How To Become Happier

Everyone wants to be happy. But it can be difficult to even define what happy is. So we end up wondering how we can possibly find our way to a place we have no idea of the location of. Much easier to define is happier, relative to what you already know. You can compare two…

The Simple Secret To Finding More Time To Make Art

"If only I had more time, I'd be far more creative" is a comment I hear over and over again as a Creativity Coach. So how do we find that elusive art time, once everything else is taken care of? The secret is simple - What we prioritise, gets done. The rest falls by the…

Accumulate Or Create (Or, Saying Bye-Bye to The Buy-Buy-Buy)

Though you could argue that all creation begins in the imagination, virtually all artists need some kind of equipment and media to bring these ideas to life. We need a way to give our creativity a tangible form that others can experience and engage with. The amount and variety of equipment and materials we need does…

Keep Your Artwork To Yourself

If you keep trying to show your work to family members, who are never likely to understand what you make, or why you need to make it, then please, keep your artwork to yourself. If you've been sharing your creations online in groups that don't appreciate or support your creative experiments and explorations, and rarely…