Creativity, and making it a practice in your daily routine, is one of the greater joys in life.
When you engage with creativity, you're allowing your ideas to come just as they are. What's difficult is allowing them to fully blossom how they were intended. This is a practice I'm currently working on where I try not to change too much what the original idea was. All sorts of factors happen when I get an idea and begin to change it.
I think the thing that comes up for me immediately is a whole set of doubts and fears. There are questions that arise from within like:
What will people think of it? Is this appropriate for right now? Can I really do something as outrageous as that? Will this offend someone somehow? How do I make this more tame?
Every time an idea comes up, I try to allow it be in its fullest form. One practice I'm doing now is to not force an idea to come to light. If I have an idea, I write or sketch it immediately and then I sit with it. It's a way of me getting to know myself too. I don't know every aspect of myself, but sometimes it comes in the form of an image and after drawing it, I wonder where it came from. I dig into the depths of my nostalgia to understand the meaning behind the image. Some images are memories, some are current thoughts, some feel like a vision into the future.
The biggest hurdle is trying not to let the business side influence my designs too much. You know the "how do I sell this?" question that will basically take a design from outrageous to tame in one second. There obviously has to be balance when you're doing both the business and the creating, but I've found that when you make from side that's pure imagination, the selling part is easier. People respond to unadulterated passion.
That's it for now, thank you so much for reading my blog. It means a lot to be able to share my thoughts this way!