Inspiration and creativity are must-haves for me. I make drawings, collages or mixed media in some kind of theme.
It helps me keep my creative skills flowing.
An intermezzo is a short piece of music written to be played on its own or as part of a longer piece. For me, it’s a welcome break from my daily activities.
In the video are a couple of examples.
Table of Contents
10% inspiration and 90% perspiration
Thomas Edison said success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. A variation was offered by Albert Einstein: Creativity is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. And more adaptations can be found while browsing the internet.
They all come down to the fact that neither creativity nor inspiration just comes by chance. We must accommodate the conditions for inspiration to do its work.
Create your own conditions
Now that I’m retired, I create those conditions through my 365-day challenges.
When I was still a graphic designer, my agenda was partly lived by the assignments of my clients. Even then, I gave both myself and my staff free assignments to constantly find new avenues for our creativity.
Related: Are Inspiration and Creativity Important for an Interesting Life?
Brainstorming
We brainstormed about subjects by writing down all kinds of words. These lists were the starting point to either draw, build, or photograph scenes. These could be realistic, illustrative, or abstract.
Trust me, once you start making a list, you can easily fill it with numerous words. I’ll give you some examples.
- Animals. This can be generic like bird, fish, or insect. More specifically are animals with pronounced skin, such as zebra, snake, turtle, peacock. All kinds of pets. Zoo animals. Etc;
- Colours. Single colours or pairs, such as complementary colours or clashing colours;
- Objects. For instance, chairs, staircases, doors, knots, bicycles, umbrellas, flags;
- Subjects. Symmetry or its opposite asymmetry, party, perspective, rhythm, shadow, light, movement.
Related: 7 Ways to Shape our Ideas without a Computer to Inspire ourselves
Intermezzo
My intermezzo images were an encore. After posting photos or drawings around a theme on Instagram and my website for a month, I made a kind of visual summary.
Where do you get your inspiration from? Tell me in the comment box below.
I like your movie. At least the pictures I see (the music is also okay). What I don’t like, is that your pictures are timed too close next to each other. You don’t give me enough time to study your beautiful pictures. The rhythm, or time sequence, of your pictures, is too speedy for me.
I know timing is very difficult in a stop-motion movie. However, your pictures are often so rich in interesting details, that I don’t know exactly where to focus my eyes. This means that even more gets lost because the span of my attention gets the wrong instructions.
What might, perhaps, help you is to watch your pictures closely, count the number of details (yes, there can be many details in a picture), and take at least 3 seconds for each detail to be noticed. I have no idea this will work, but perhaps you do get a more logical rhythm in your sequences.
Ah, I see what you mean, Mia, and I can imagine your remark. One problem with YouTube (where the video is on), is that you can’t edit or exchange the video later on. But I do have 2 solutions for you.
1. Go to settings, the little wheel on the bottom-right of the video (if you don’t see it, you have to mouse over the video). Here you can alter the speed, either making the video quicker or slower.
2. In Chrome you can add an extension to quickly alter the speed of any video, whether it’s on YouTube or another platform. The extension is Video Speed Controller. I love it especially because you can quickly change the speed with just a key on your keyboard.
Thanks for your remark, Mia, and I hope this helps.