From the course: Creative Exercises to Spark Original Thinking

Morph to move beyond a single idea

From the course: Creative Exercises to Spark Original Thinking

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Morph to move beyond a single idea

- Sometimes two is better than one. For instance, my daughter Celeste makes incredible zucchini bread with fresh squash grown in our garden. The other day, she took a chance and added walnuts. Bringing these two flavors together made the bread not only more delicious, but it added a great crunch. Ingredients, like ideas and images, can enhance each other when they're combined. Sometimes two things feel like they could never be woven together successfully. But the act of trying sometimes helps us break new ground, new flavors. So I love drawing animals. When I travel, I always visit natural history museums with a sketchbook to gather new material. Victorian era museums are often very beautiful, quiet places to draw. Taxidermy specimens are great models because they never move and you can generally draw them from multiple angles. Sometimes, however, I'm not near a museum, so I rely on photographs. Lately, I've been experimenting with morphing two animals together resulting in sort of a other wordly, futuristic drawing. First I trace or draw each animal separately. Once I do this, I take the line drawings and play with layering and flipping them in different ways until I arrive at a hybrid that feels compelling. I know I could do this in Photoshop, but I like the organic hands-on manipulation of the paper. From here, I elaborate a drawing based on the layered tracings to create a totally new species. These hybrids are fun to make. And because it's just tracing, it's easy to try. So rather than working with a singular idea, try joining two things to make something new. It will empower you to break new ground through the act of transformation.

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