Expressing Inspiration Through Art
I made this mixed media drawing “Storyteller’s Power” for the class Inspirational Drawing 2.0. I have created it from a collection of inspiration images. One of them is Luca Mombello’s Renaissance painting “The Immaculate and God the Father” which I saw at the recent renaissance art exhibition of The National Museum of Finland. Seeing the artwork, and how it reminded me of modern fantasy novels, caused a huge spark of inspiration. But when I heard that the frame was handmade by the painter, it felt mind-blowing. What an artist!
Inspiration is Often Visual
It doesn’t have to be an art exhibition to make me inspired. I see ideas everywhere. Because of that, I am a useless listener without doodling or knitting. If I listen to a long lecture without nothing to do with my hands, I find visual ideas and inspiration everywhere. I look at the pipes attached to the ceiling or count the colors of the clothes. Soon, I have discovered a new idea that has nothing to do with what I came to listen! I believe that especially for visual people, inspiration is often visual too. We get excited by what we see and can’t help being drawn to colors and details.
Only You Can Express Your Inspiration!
Over three years ago I started to find a solution for expressing inspiration by drawing and painting. The world was full of images that embarked my excitement, but it seemed impossible to express it genuinely through art. I was either too intentional which brought stiffness, or too intuitive, which took me just further away from my original inspiration.
I already had some experience of using mood boards when studying design so I was certain that there was a solution to the problem. But rather than creating a new design, I wanted to use the images for enriching artistic expression. The idea was not to copy but boost imagination in a meaningful and intentional way. After all, inspiration is a personal feeling, and it should be interpreted in a personal way. Even if it’s evoked by something or someone, there’s always something unique in the way each one of us experiences it. Only you can express your inspiration!
Expressing Inspiration Through Art
An inspirational image can quickly touch hearts but drawing and painting is a slower process. We can use images for picking visual ideas but we also need to process the inspiration so that we know why we got inspired in the first place. I believe that the images are like icons that bring up personal memories, points of view and aspirations. If we don’t connect with those, we don’t fully put the inspiration into use for art making.
At the first version of Inspirational Drawing, I showed a method for using an inspirational image as the source of ideas for a new drawing. At Inspirational Drawing 2.0, I introduce an improved process. It helps you to use one or more images as an inspiration source, connect with the thoughts and feelings that they evoke and create unique art from there. First, I show samples and walk you through a simplified process. Then I help you to create a bigger project that uses many kinds of inspiration along creating.
Claudia Watkins, one of the students says: “Paivi is a very profound lady. Her insights are amazing. Although having a technical background, Paivi sees beauty, philosophy, and art in everything. Paivi has helped me a lot in my art journey.”
Express Your Inspiration: Sign up for Inspirational Drawing 2.0!
Video: How to Move from Figurative to Abstract Art?
I made a video blog post again. This time I answered to a reader’s question about how to open up to create unique and abstract art. This video is especially for you who wants to move from figurative to abstract art.
In the end of the video, I paint an abstract-themed postcard with watercolors. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it!
How to Move from Figurative to Abstract Art?
Get Intuitive Focus + Reader’s Comment!
“I am all over the place. I need to focus”.
It’s what I often hear when people talk about their creativity.
I used to scold myself there too. After a quilting class, I swore I would use all my creative time to modern quilting only. But after finishing one quilt project, I was ready to knit again. I questioned myself when I drew because I had just made a promise to focus on painting. I found it impossible to stick to one style or one genre of creating, and I saw that as my worst weakness.
But the more I have been into intuitive art, the more I have realized that creative people often underestimate the connections between what they do. The more conscious I have become about how my creative process works, the less I need to criticize my natural behavior.
4 Ways of Creating
I classify creating as:
– reflecting by creating
– generating ideas by creating
– imagining by creating
– and finally, focusing on the insight you’ve got by creating
If I write about past events in my planner or knit, it’s reflecting. When I get ideas, I create art journal pages or quick craft projects. With a collection of ideas, I can gradually gear my imagination towards the bigger themes that I want to express.
When I create just to save my ideas, I don’t work for hours to get everything right. It’s a piece that had to be created so that I can move on. But when I am creating a bigger project, like my big canvas painting last week, I fine-tune every little detail and put a lot more time into the project.
What Does Intuitive Focus Mean?
Intuitive focus means that you treat your activities as part of creative process. You continuously collect and process theories, techniques, ideas, approaches so that you can create your best pieces now and then. You embrace diversity in techniques, themes, styles, etc. Diversity will not be distracting if you spend enough time for reflecting.
Once you do this, you will get in touch with your root problems:
Your lack of focus on one activity or idea turns into a lack of ways to combine it all together.
Your lack of focus on one technique turns into a lack of foundation that can be applied to many techniques.
Teaching Art – Reader’s Comment
In my last weekly email (do subscribe!) I wrote about whether teachers share openly or not and why would they not:
“Last week, I read a comment somewhere on the internet. It praised a teacher about sharing openly. The commenter also said that she often gets the feeling that teachers hide something. Even if this was not about any of my classes it made me think. Do I share openly? Why would a teacher not share openly? When building classes, I try to focus on the essentials and be understandable, clear and not all over the place. That’s good, right?”
“But when teaching intuitive art, I have to admit that almost anything can be meaningful to the process. A random thought can steer the painting to a new direction. So I decided to add more video to my next class Nature in Your Mind showing how I ramble while creating and how it affects my painting. I also show how I use music to help me let go. While recording, I felt vulnerable. Every time I became silent, I forced myself to ask: what did I just think? There’s also the pressure of time. I can’t create for 7 hours and then make an educational video out of that.”
“So I have to choose smaller projects for the exercises and recordings. But truly, I don’t intentionally hide anything. I don’t think many teachers do. For some, explaining is more difficult than for others. Some find it difficult to give honest feedback. When I started teaching, I made a promise always to give as useful and as personalized feedback as possible while the workshop is running. For many, understanding the slight changes they can make is a game changer. It’s a pity if the teacher never points out those. Probably that’s the situation when the teacher seems to be hiding something. What do you think?”
Meri Andriesse wrote to me as a response to the email:
“I sign up for a lot of workshops in painting and mixed media and I find they vary greatly in content. To be honest, I don’t think some teachers have enough substantive content in their classes and they rush through without explaining why they are doing or not going or un-doing something. So much of what we see and hear focuses on the intuitive part of creativity but I think in order to use intuition you really need some foundation in composition and color theory/experimentation. Your workshops offer that and more and that is why I continue to sign up for them even though I don’t have adequate free time for art making.”
Teaching art is often based on process videos only. Meri comments that too:
“Videos are great, but I also appreciate the pdf documents and diagrams and photos. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend your classes to anyone really interested in growing their art-making.”
Create intuitive art + set a foundation for your creating!
>> Sign up for Nature in Your Mind!
This is the last chance to register! The registration will close on Oct 10th midnight PST.
How to Transform Ideas into Paintings
I am an idea person. When I get exposed to new things, my mind fills up with new ideas. Most of the ideas that pop into my mind are not that good. They are either too conventional or too radical. Some ideas are impossible to implement, and some have nothing to take on.
When I was a child, I happily filled the days playing with what came to my mind. But when I was studying computer engineering at a university, I became a master in shooting down my ideas. It may sound depressing, but it has led to a brilliant realization for me: the number of ideas doesn’t equal to the number of projects. When you have limited creative time, you don’t have to divide it with all your creative ideas.
Raw Ideas – Bad that Produce Good
When a new idea comes to your mind, call it “a raw idea.” If you get visual ideas, quickly sketch them on your journal. If they are more words than images, write them down. Don’t over-analyze your sketches, treat this just a routine that makes you move on and continue producing new ideas.
Raw ideas are often not so great, and you have to be careful not to spend too much time in implementing them. Raw ideas are like raw potatoes. Add some rosemary, salt, pepper, olive oil, carrots, onions, and zucchini and put them all in the oven for 30 minutes, and you will have a brilliant idea.
Many believe that getting new ideas is the thing. They fall in love with their raw ideas and then get disappointed with how they look on paper. But the essence of creating is in the processing. It’s about combining tens of ideas into one focused idea.
Record Everything!
We humans are very similar to computers in one aspect. We have a limited capacity of processing unsaved ideas. If you never draw or paint or write down your ideas, the processing of them becomes difficult, almost impossible.
I often have an illusion that if I just think a little bit longer before I begin painting, l can start with better ideas. But then I remember that it’s just the opposite: when you see your raw ideas on paper, you can make them better. When you use the raw ideas to create the new painting, you can then visualize stories instead of creating single conventional elements.
From a Disappointment to a Happy Art Journal Page
Here’s an example of how a conventional raw idea can turn into an expressive story.
When I am finishing a painting session, there’s always the same problem: I still have paint on my palette. Have you confronted this too?
It doesn’t feel good just to wash it away, so I take one of my art journals, and use it up. I often feel tired already, and painting isn’t particularly inspiring, especially when there’s a limited amount of colors left on the palette. I made this gloomy landscape on one of those moments. The painting looked sad and empty. It felt like I had wasted my time for a lousy raw idea. But then, another day came, and I got the idea to add pastel elements in the dark painting.
While painting, I remembered a television series, The X-files, that we used to watch with my boyfriend, now a husband, a long time ago. When an episode began, I always whistled the tune then grabbed my knitting. Although the episodes were terribly exciting, we always laughed at the whistling. The same mixture of suspense and happiness entered my spread after adding the pastel elements. The painting that had no real emotional connection became a reminder of a happy memory.
Ideas that Keep Coming Back
When you sketch ideas, you will also notice that most of them are very not different from each other.
This similarity of ideas is fascinating. When I come up with the same idea again and again, I have to find out what’s behind it. Why does my mind repeatedly travel to the same place?
When preparing for the fall, I was about to release only one new painting workshop: Nature in Your Mind. It’s an online class where I have processed a lot of technique ideas to give you the very best experiences and results in painting. But while working with Nature in Your Mind, I had one more idea that I kept shooting down again and again. No matter how much I did that, it always came back. I saw color. I saw circles. And yes, I sketched them hundreds of times just to get rid of them! But then one day I said to myself: “Ok let’s find out what behind this idea.” So I discovered a compelling formula for creating abstract paintings so that you can fully enjoy painting with colors.
Planet Color – Get the 7-step Formula!
With the 7-step formula, you can release your mind and focus on color. You can create unique paintings while experimenting with unique color combinations. You can work with your raw ideas and combine them to a bigger picture. The workshop is called Planet Color, reserve your spot now!
Enjoy colors and release your mind!
>> Sign up for Planet Color!