My Creativity Course Challenge

www.creativethursday.com

This has been such a fun week for me.  I recently enrolled in the Creative Thursday E-Course by Marisa Haedike and we began our projects this week.  I had never enrolled in an E Course before, but I was looking for some motivation to come my way and there Marisa was!  I had always followed her blog and enjoyed her posts and her website.  The description of this course truly made my heart leap and I knew it was something I wanted to do.

Each week she would post a video and a "Creative Challenge" that we would each participate in.  You also get to communicate with the other fellow "Creatives" as Marisa calls us.  (I like that)  You can leave comments  for each other on her blog, or post pics on the Flicker Site.  I am already learning more than I thought and it is just week one.  I didn't even know what Flicker was!

This weeks challenge was to create something from Photography or Writing.  I love the writing, so I decided to do something out of my comfort zone, Photography.  I have a great little Nikon Coolpix, but what I don't have is a fancy dancy incredible camera.  I started taking lots of shots of gardens, my own plants, and things in the Outer Banks this past weekend.  I settled on a plant that my four children put together for me for Mother's Day.

I love the colors and the different hues in the Elephant Ear leaves, so I took a picture as you can see.

I took several pictures of the plant, but what I wanted to concentrate on was capturing the beautiful colors and doing something with them.  How would I do that?  I chose watercolors, my favorite medium of all! I got out my paints, paper and brushes and started to blend and see the colors start to come together.  I then even added a little texture medium to the watercolors.  I started to play with the painting, still knowing I was not done with my project yet.

So I got the idea to create a paper weaving with my painting.  I began to cut up the painting in little 1/2" strips.  I learned never to be afraid to do something different with your work, not all watercolor paintings are meant to be framed and hung on the wall!  I began paper weaving and liked what I saw!

I took a step back to observe my work and realized that I had come to where I wanted to be.  What had I learned from this experience???

Visualization

Creative Play

Photography

Project deadlines work!

Inner pride for a job well done

Today I took it just a step further and decided to frame a little extra piece of the weaving.  I then proceeded to write words that spoke to me (don't think you can see in photo)  I began to write the words love, yoga, muse, create, think, awareness, zen

on the strip of weaving.  This will hang in my studio.

So my first week's challenge was fun and as I am finishing my blog entry to share with you, I realized that I did use both mediums Marisa asked us to use, photography and writing, here is my writing in my blog!

Creativity is about exploration, design, and listening to what is inside.  Sometimes it doesn't always work and sometimes you come up with delightful surprises.  To me creativity is all about finding the time to work at what you love and never being afraid to try something "out of my comfort zone".

Thanks Creative Thursday, can't wait to see what is up for next week!