In the Twitter #NZBloggers chat at the weekend we were discussing motivation and inspiration and one of the questions about inspiration actually conveniently inspired this post! The lovely Hannah from A Lovely Look asked 'Do you have hobbies outside of blogging? What are they? Do you think they help keep you inspired & motivated for blogging?' Although I don't actually have many hobbies, I mean blogging is my hobby really, it made me realise how much of my life was really creative and inspirational anyway. The design world is really inspiring so just being a design student and going to University daily inspires me so much. But it's not just getting inspired that's important, it's what you do with that inspiration. How do you funnel this inspiration into creativity, how do you express creativity?
Of course there's blogging! Blogging is such an amazing way to be creative and write, draw, photograph anything that you feel worthy and share your feelings about them. Not only can pretty much anyone do it, but almost everyone's blogs are individual as our signatures as it's all personal. (Of course there's non personal ones but let's ignore those at the moment.) That was another main point in the blogger chat 'We're all inspired by those around us - how do you make sure your ideas are original?' and the fact is that, although we may have the same ideas as some other bloggers, they're both going to be written from different points of view. There's so many posts on the internet already it's amazing if you find an idea that not one person has ever written about before so just go with it! Unless they're directly copied from the publicity post then two posts on the same book aren't going to be exactly the same. One may love one part and the other may hate it, it's all personal opinions. Even this post is simply that, my personal opinion. How many others have written about creativity and inspiration I wonder?
These new adult colouring books have created a great way for those who 'can't be creative because I can't draw' or other similar excuses to get creative! I've seen so many fellow bloggers, twitter users, and instagrammers who have been loving these books but I couldn't bring myself to buy one and procrastinate my University work more. Luckily my boyfriend's mum bought me one so I can now procrastinate happily knowing it wasn't me who reinforced it ha! But these are a great way to just sit down with a big flood of creative energy and relax colouring in. I don't know about you, but as a kid if we ever had to colour in together I would get rather annoyed at the others who didn't know how to stay between the lines!
Personally having a really creative life means that it's easy to distract myself with other work. My University work is really stressful at the moment, there's less than three weeks left and I feel like I have about 10 weeks worth of work to do. Sometimes it just gets too much and I cry, and scream, and rage like a little baby. It's then that I can just simply swap to doing something else, I keep being creative so that I can easily go back and continue working but it's just giving my brain a quick break from the hard work with some easy relaxing stuff. Last week for example I was raging at one of my projects and I just sat back and wrote a spur of the moment blogpost that turned out being one of my most interacted with and viewed post so far on my blog. Bashing away at the keyboard, or swirling a brush of ink around on a page to make words, totally calms the mind after having to concentrate on the spacing between the letters of one word for about 20 minutes (welcome to kerning and the world of design).
I know what a few of you do for inspiration from the chat however what do you do with that inspiration? How do you express your creativity?
