Photo courtesy SXC.

Arts & Healing Network – AHN Awards
Every year the Arts and Healing Network honors healing artists who are truly making a difference in the world. In 2011, the organization gave away three awards of $4,000 each. The recipients were Ricky Lee Gordon, Naomi Natale, and Sara Potler.

10 Mobile Apps for Highly Creative People | Duarte Blog
Steve Wishman offers a roundup of applications for smartphones and tablets that allow one to flesh out visual concepts on the go. Sketching, image collecting and photo editing apps are included in the list.

15 Scientific Facts About Creativity | Creativity Matters
An extensive collection of research relating to creative activity. Some of the more intriguing studies included in the post:

• Those considered geniuses describe their creative processes as trancelike
• A connection between dopamine production and creativity might exist
• Improvisation stimulates the brain’s language centers

Love These Oil Paintings? They’re Actually Made Of Yarn | Co.Design
A brief report on Cayce Zavaglia, who has developed an extraordinary technique for using wool thread to evoke the colors and textures of oil paint. Zavaglia was trained as a painter, but when she got pregnant with her daughter, she decided not to use oils anymore (what with all the turpentine and varnish fumes wafting around). The result is a series of portraits that are is entirely — and painstakingly — hand-stitched. The larger ones measure about a foot tall and 3 feet wide, and take as many as six months to complete.

10 Commandments for Creatives
Andrew Zahn, an actor and blogger, has created a beautiful destined-to-go-viral post that dives right into the heart of innovation and reminds us of how important it is to make room for creativity in the day to day.

Some of my favorite commandments include: give space, time and energy to your creativity; jealousy is the death of creativity; you have what it takes . . .  now; and authenticity breeds beauty.

Perfectionism is rooted in grandiosity
Lovely post excerpted from Rettig’s book “The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer’s Block” that punctures the myth that perfectionism and grandiose posturing serves any purpose for writers, and by extension, all creators.

I particularly like her critique of macho writing-is-hell quotes from authors such as Red Smith and Gene Fowler. She opines:

“I actually find quotes about how awful writing and the writing life are to be not just perfectionist, but self-indulgent. No one’s forcing these writers to write, after all; and there are obviously far worse ways to spend one’s time, not to mention earn one’s living. All worthwhile endeavors require hard, and occasionally tedious, work; and, if anything, we writers have it easy, with unparalleled freedom to work where and how we wish—in contrast to, say, potters who need a wheel and kiln, or Shakespearean actors who need a stage and ensemble. Nonperfectionist and nongrandiose writers recognize all this.”

Image courtesy SXC.

Oh, how I love the first few weeks of January – that time of boundless optimism and dreaming big. The hard part is holding onto that positive energy when it’s the middle of July and you realize your plan to achieve great things got derailed in late March.

Here are 12 tips for making your creative dreams come true this year. All are offered with the hope that you’ll enjoy the bliss that comes with being in the “flow” of creation!

Tips for creative liberation

1. Focus on one goal or goal step at a time - you don’t have to limit yourself to one goal, or even one focus word, for the year, but when you’re working on a particular project, give it your full attention. Hone in on the step you’re taking today to move toward accomplishing the goal, and how it fits with the next step.

2. Use downtime for creativity, even if it just means incubating ideas instead of playing Angry Birds - think about how you spend your time in line at the store, or the DMV, or at the doctor’s office. Our versatile smartphones can be used for more than Facebooking or gaming when we’re waiting. Journaling, planning and sketching can all take place during small slivers of time, whether you’re using analog tools or digital ones.

3. Use your commute time to create - this is an extension of the previous tip. If you use public transit to commute, you have a built-in 30 to 60 (or more)  minute chunk every day to work on your creative projects.

4. Take a class - Studying with a teacher can help you improve specific skills, and you can gain insight from your classmates’ work and feedback.

5. Teach a class - Instructing others in something you’ve mastered will help you learn even more about the subject matter. There’s always some skill you can pass along to someone else, even if you’re a beginner.

6. Make room to create - If you are struggling to find creative space or carve out time to practice your art, cleaning out your house or your schedule can unleash suppressed creative energy.

7. Build a routine that supports your creative work - Positive habits are the building blocks of a daily schedule that helps you start and finish more projects. Your morning or evening schedule may not even need a complete makeover – a few tweaks here and there may allow you to develop and maintain your creative momentum.

8. Find the edge of your creative skillset and take up residence there - Some creative failure is less a matter of making mistakes as it is getting stale and bored or not overcoming a long-standing obstacle in terms of technique. Look at the practice routine for your creative passion. How do you warm up when you engage in your creativity? What can you do that’s hard, but stretches you to expand yourself and become more skilled?

9. Pursue worthy projects - Another way to overcome staleness or ennui in your creative passion is to keep doing projects that you’re crazy about. These “worthy projects” could be big in terms of scope, impact or the developmental “stretch” you’ll have to accomplish in order to complete them. Don’t worry if a project is so breathtakingly big that it scares you – that’s actually a good sign!

10. Throw yourself into the deep end of the pool - Related to #9, this tip recognizes that we tend to engage our creativity most when we’re the least comfortable. Give yourself some constraints (a/k/a limits) that will force you to start working and silence the inner critic. You can always revise things as you go along. Sometimes, you just have to dive in at the outset of an adventure to overcome your inertia.

11. Get enough sleep - It’s hard to get much done if you wander around in a fog caused by sleep deprivation or insomnia. (Believe me, I know!) If there are medical or psychological issues involved, get the help you need. If that’s not the case, consider your wind-down routine in the evening. The time just before falling asleep can be a fruitful time for your creative subconscious, so take care of it by designing a bedtime routine that relaxes you and puts you in a hopeful frame of mind.

12. Connect your creativity to something bigger than yourself - Maybe it’s not all about you?! That can be a big relief if the self-expressive part of art-making has become paralyzing self-obsession or unbearably painful self-revelation. Christine Valters Paintner, who operates The Abbey of the Arts, has written The Artist’s Rule, a wonderful resource for exploring art-making as a path to deeper spiritual discovery.

Photo courtesy SXC.

Today I present the second in a series of audio meditations based upon the Creative Person’s Guide to Focus blog series I posted last winter. This meditation is based upon the post I did on the importance of unplugging from digital tools and toys in order to aid concentration.

The post-holiday lull is perfect for carving out some non-electronic creative time, so please enjoy this meditation, which is meant as an encouragement and support for your offline creative endeavors!

Listen to the audio meditation:

Photo by Marina Nisi courtesy of SXC.

The Most Artistic Cities in America | The Atlantic Cities
An interesting slideshow and survey crafted by Richard Florida, senior editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Florida ranks leading United States metro areas for both their numbers of artists and their concentration relative to their population.

Infographic Of The Day: 13 Rules For Realizing Your Creative Vision | Co. Design
Cliff Kuang shares a playful infographic by Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot, that translates a baker’s dozen worth of guidelines for creativity into wordless illustrations that use Rubik’s style cubes to make their point. Some of my favorite “rules” are: accept that everything is a draft; banish procrastination; laugh at perfection – it’s boring and keeps you from being done; and, people without dirty hands are wrong.

Greek doors of art – Photo Essay | Mallory On Travel
An amazing photo study of the riotous variety of doors that traveler and blogger Iain Mallory found on a recent trip to Greece. The colors and shapes (and contents) of these portals will surprise you!

Thinking Out of the Box: How Physical Experience Enhances Creativity
Wray Herbert, author of “On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits,” discusses an intriguing study by psychological researcher Angela Leung and her colleagues at Singapore Management University that seems to indicate that physical movement has a measurable impact on the quality of various sorts of creative problem-solving situations.

He writes,

“Actual physical acts appear to activate the abstract processes that overcome mental rigidity and make new connections — the nuts and bolts of creativity. Something as simple as gesturing with alternate hands, or literally getting out of the box, may eliminate unconscious barriers that restrict thinking.”

10 Expert Tips on Hiring for Creativity | Inc.com
Tim Donnelly surveyed advertising, marketing and HR professionals for tips on hiring creative professionals, and the answers he shares with readers are pretty interesting. Some of my favorite tips include: look for people rooted in strategy; craft an amazing job listing; ask what they’re reading; and, throw in a wildcard.

Creative Block: Why Does It Happen? (Part 1) | Keitharsis
Writer Keith Jennings explores metaphors and the causation of creative stoppages and throws questions out to his readers about their experiences with creative blocks. They respond, and the entire post/comment package is a nice starting point for reflecting on why blocks happen and what they really consist of.

Photo courtesy of SXC.

It’s possible that I love posting lists of potential “creative” holiday presents even more than I love receiving gifts. It’s not that I am some sort of consumerist shopaholic – to the contrary, I get jazzed about Christmas giving in large part because of the many self-created gift options open to artists and innovators.

If you’re creative, you never have to worry about your budget or life circumstances cramping your gift-giving style. Applying your well-honed ingenuity can make it simple to craft presents that are beautiful, thoughtful and thrifty.

Here are a few ways to recognize your friends and loved ones, with presents that reflect the season’s generous nature and tap into the joy of discovery and originality.

Holiday gift ideas

1. Record an online video holiday greeting for your peeps and post it to YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook. You can also send it to them privately using a free service like DV Cards.

2. Go retro and create mix CDs for the people on your holiday list, or a customized playlist  for their MP3 player.

3. Create a “sample size” gift representing a work in progress: a snippet of poetry, a tiny painting, a short song. Fans of your creativity will be thrilled to see what you’ve been up to.

4. Invite 3-4 friends to start a creativity-focused mastermind group, in which you all provide accountability and encouragement for each other’s projects.

5. Organize an afternoon of Skype caroling with far-flung friends. Go Caroling Day is December 20!

6. Host a discovery-themed holiday potluck or cook-off. Invite some of your more adventurous friends over, provide a culinary theme, and organize your pals into teams to create delicious new holiday dishes or treats. The emphasis should be on learning and sharing, not out-and-out competition.

7. Offer to teach a friend how to master a creative discipline you’re good at, such as playing the guitar or photography.

8. Bless an aspiring artist with some real-world advice – perhaps “Ancient Wisdom: Emerging Artist: The Business Plan (not just) for the Mature Artist” by Sue Favinger Smith (which features an interview with yours truly) or “I’d Rather Be In The Studio” by Alyson Stanfield. If you know lots of aspiring creatives, you could start a study group using one of these volumes.

9. Finally, make it a point to create “experience” gifts with your loved ones, which will definitely stick in people’s minds longer than store-bought fruitcake or a gift card. You and your gift recipient can craft a day customized to your common interests and budget.

The question to you

How do you use your creativity or artistic abilities to create holiday presents for family and loved ones?

Writer and photographer Susannah Conway

Today I share a conversation I conducted by email with writer, photographer and creative teacher Susannah Conway, who lives in the United Kingdom. She has gone through what many of us would consider the worst experience of our lives – the sudden death of our beloved – and emerged from it with new strength, wisdom and things to share with others.

Conway’s use of her “unraveling” concept to cope with her grief and thrive as she recovered from her loss, and the projects that have grown from it, are an example of what I call a worthy project. Please enjoy the interview and some of her images!

Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, where you are from, and how you got started with photography and writing.

I am a photographer and writer living in Bath, England. I lead self-awareness e-courses online and have just written two books, both of which will be coming out in 2012. I think my creative journey started the day I learned how to write—I’ve had a pencil and notebook in my hands ever since! I studied photography for three years at college and later completed a degree in journalism, working for a national newspaper before going freelance in 2003. In 2005 the man I loved died very suddenly and my life went off on a very different tangent through bereavement and eventually healing. I found my way back to myself through my cameras and journals.

How did you utilize art during your healing process after the death of your partner? How did photography and blogging become a part of this?

Writing has always been the way I figure stuff out and connect with how I’m feeling. I’ve kept a journal for the last 27 years, so it was very natural for me to write my way through my grief. In the second year of my bereavement I discovered blogging and it opened up this whole new creative world to me. Being able to share my thoughts and feelings online was incredibly empowering — it was my way of ‘getting back out there’ from the safety of my living room.

Photography has always been a part of my life, but the blog gave me a new reason to take pictures and share them. I’d take myself out on Artist’s Dates (inspired by Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way) going to new places to take photographs and then coming home to post them on my blog. I started exploring self portraiture, which was incredibly healing as it helped me to see myself again — literally, but also as the woman I was becoming, a woman who was working her way through loss and finding herself again.

What is the “unraveling” concept and how did it come about? When did you realize you wanted to share this concept with others in the form of a personal development class?

Unraveling is the word I used to describe my healing process — I was peeling away the layers of myself to find out what was underneath and get back to the real me. In this context unraveling is not a negative thing but rather a letting go and a simplifying. In 2008 I moved to a new city and was given the opportunity to teach a photography class at a local adult education center. As they already had a technical photography class, I decided to create something more meaningful … and that was when my unraveling class first occurred to me. It was the first time I had taught in person and I was blown away by how the participants embraced the ideas of the class.

What advice would you have for someone wanting to use photography as a healing tool?

Use the camera as an excuse to pay attention to your life. Keep your camera with you at all times to document your days — smart phones are great for this as you always have them with you. Dip into self portraiture and remember that you control the camera and can delete the photos you don’t like! Go to new places and investigate what you find, and then bring that curiosity back home and investigate the familiar places too.

You’ve used old media (including your forthcoming books) and new media (blogging, e-courses) etc., to spread the word about your work. What are some differences between sharing in traditional media and emerging forms of media?

New media is faster and much more interactive. In my previous life I wrote for newspapers and magazines, and though I occasionally received letters from readers, there’s very little engagement with your audience. It’s the same with books. Now, new media is changing all of that — you can publish a new blog post and get feedback in minutes. Authors can engage with their readers through their blogs, videos and newsletters. I love the community aspect of social media and am very active on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

What do you hope to provide readers in your forthcoming books?

Instant Love: How to Make Magic and Memories with Polaroids is the book I wrote with Jen Altman and Amanda Gilligan and is for anyone who wishes to explore the world of instant photography.

My book, This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart, is an inspiring guidebook of sorts, a collection of thoughts and theories about loss, healing and self-discovery. The words are accompanied by my Polaroid images, and it’s the sort of book you read on the sofa with a huge mug of coffee and blanket. I hope it will feel like an old friend.

A number of creative people believe the ultimate point of artistic endeavor is to make meaning of our life experiences. Would you agree? Why?

Yes I would, though sometimes our creative endeavors are less about finding meaning and more about the need to express ourselves, create something new or simply to entertain ourselves. Making something out of nothing is a wonderful thing — knitting, cooking, putting up new shelves. In my writing and photography I strive to make sense of my life, absolutely, but sometimes I just want to make a pretty picture — that is enough.

Do you have any long-term visions or hopes for your body of work?

I hope to keep writing and taking photographs. I know I have many more books in me.

Learn more about Susannah Conway’s work

Website

Twitter

Photo courtesy of SXC. 

How Gender Roles Crush Creativity

Terri Giuliano Long of Creative Flux blog has written an excellent and impassioned assertion of the right of children and their parents to engage in activities outside of societally prescribed gender roles.

She writes,

Circumscribed gender roles – among the most stereotypical and arbitrary of rules – put kids in a box. Reining kids in — forcing adherence to arbitrary roles for the sake of social acceptance — bridles their imagination, teaches them to conform. If we hope to foster creativity in our children, we need to give them room to breathe, space to imagine.

Finding Creative Productivity In The ‘Sunshine Spot’

Writer, photographer and new media producer Carole Jane Treggett pens an upbeat post about the value of pushing through discomfort to achieve creative satisfaction. Here’s a mini-version of the post, contained in a brief quote from it:

Cinnamon (Carole’s cat) is quite tenacious about his priority to get his dose of pleasurable warmth each morning.

It got me thinking: why do I stay in the cold shadows of doubt, fear and insecurity when I could easily just move myself to my creative practice, my own ‘sunshine spot’?

I don’t know about you, but when I move forward, despite the discomfort of those feelings and do the work – regardless of how many legitimate stressful circumstances or distractions I have to deal with – an inevitable warm flush of satisfaction, reassurance or well-being (or all three!) flows through me.

Are You Giving Away Too Many Ideas? | Game Changer

Jorge Barba argues that freely sharing ideas with potential clients and others before a deal is reached is generally a good thing. He notes that idea-sharing as a way of doing business can overwhelm client resistance, become a starting point for productive and profitable conversations, and is part of the “new normal” in our social-media-enhanced world.

MagicalPad: An Ideal Tool for Idea Capture and Organization On the iPad

Chuck Frey, writing on his InnovationTools.com website, reviews the MagicalPad, a free-form notetaking and outlining tool for the iPad. MagicalPad’s freeform layout makes it easy to prioritize actions, split and merge outlines, create sticky-like notes and format content to effectively express ideas and organize thoughts. Users can attach their iPad to an HDTV or HD projection screen using Apple’s digital AV adapter and project their ideas onto a big screen, making the app ideal for business collaboration, brainstorming and presentations.

8 Tips on Creating Innovative and Engaging Products/Services | Zenstorming

This post takes lessons learned in a Writer’s Digest article on how to start a chapter in an engaging manner and applies them to designing an innovative service or product. Some of the best tips: get straight to the action; act first, think later; and fully engage with specific visual details. Clever!

Tweets Become Mini-Movies in Director’s Campaign to Fund Short Film | Mashable

Eddy Terstall found a unique way to raise €20,000 to produce his upcoming movie, “Deal.” He initially turned to CineCrowd.nl, a sort of Kickstarter for Dutch filmmakers like himself. But when that didn’t yield enough money, Terstall got the idea of making mini-movies called “Twitflicks” based on fans’ tweets for a fee. Here’s the link to some of these mini-movies!

Photo courtesy Alex Bramwell via SXC.

Today I offer what I hope is the first of many audio programs to facilitate greater creative success. This first program guides you through setting an intention, then doing a guided visualization related to single-tasking – which I define as doing one thing at a time consistently, and giving it your full concentration.

This meditation is based upon the post on single-tasking which I did last year during my Creative Person’s Guide to Focus series. Enjoy!

Listen to the audio meditation:

Download the audio meditation:

Audio Meditation: Single-Tasking for Creative Focus

Photo courtesy SXC.

Top 10 Ways Artists Make Money | Fine Art Tips
Lori McNee, a professional artist who specializes in still life and landscape oil paintings, offers a roundup of markets for visual artworks. Each one of the ways listed in this post is linked with an article offering more in-depth information. Some of the ways to make money will be familiar, others perhaps not so much for a beginning professional artist. And any creative person who produces tangible works may be able to glean some ideas here.

9 Ways to Be Innovative When Your Boss Isn’t
Paul Sloane lists a number of strategic, psychological and commonsense tactics for selling an innovative work-related idea to one’s supervisor. Best tips of the lot include: understand his objectives and motivations; align your idea with corporate objectives; sell risk avoidance to the risk-averse boss; don’t ask for approval, ask for suggestions; and build it anyway.

Everyday Items Made from Old Paper | My Modern Metropolis
This post highlights the work of UK artist Jennifer Collier, who takes old, discarded paper products and turns them into incredible replicas of everyday items like typewriters, cameras, clothes, and even shoes. Amazing repurposing!

Clutter can kill creativity and innovation | Unclutterer
Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade and Uncertainty, briefly explains the brain science behind organization enhancing creative activity and asserts that, “If you’re looking to cultivate an optimal mindset for creativity and innovation, explore shifting some of the organizational/working-memory workload from your brain to more other-than-human organizational systems.”

Product Development: 9 Steps for Creative Problem Solving
Ronald Brown, a successful startup CEO and the author of the new book, Anticipate. The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success, presents a wonderfully simple infographic that crystallizes all the major steps in the innovation/design thinking cycle and offers them in language anyone, business savvy or not, can understand.

Computer Gamers Solve Problem in AIDS Research That Puzzled Scientists for Years
This is the ultimate crowdsourcing story, reported on Discover Magazine’s “Not Exactly Rocket Science” blog. When scientists struggle with a problem for over a decade, few of them think, “I know! I’ll ask computer gamers to help.” That, however, is exactly what Firas Khatib from the University of Washington did. The result: he and his legion of gaming co-authors have cracked a longstanding problem in AIDS research that scientists have puzzled over for years. It took them three weeks.

Artist Fi Bowman

Today we chat with Fi Bowman, an English artist who, like her artwork, is quirky, magical, mythic and poetic. She creates illustrations and other visual works that are rich with the folklore, myth, legend and literature of the English landscape and frequently feature faeries, goblins, woodland nymphs and little green men.

As she tells her blog visitors, “I don’t believe that faery tale, myth and legend are just for children. I believe they tap into our need for a deeper picture of the world than science provides – a need for mystery and things that aren’t explained but are understood in the bones.  And a need for connection with the natural, wild world that so many of us are disconnected from in our daily lives. And I feel sorry for people who can no longer feel that.”

Fi thinks and writes quite a bit about her art-making process on her blog, so her interview is filled with wise insights about how she keeps her creative juices flowing!

Tell us about your creative pursuits, paid and unpaid.

Hmm. Well, sometimes it seems to me that life is the one big creative pursuit we all share, but I imagine you’re thinking of something more specific?

I guess my biggest creative pull is from visual arts – specifically the intersection between the traditional fine arts of drawing and painting and the so-called craft medium of textiles. It’s taken me pretty much the whole of my life to get to the point where I understand that the two can somehow come together, and merge with my life-long interest in stories of myth, magic and folklore. This is where my focus is currently, and where the ‘paid’ part comes into it, although I’m really just at the beginning of a quest to pursue that full time.

As for unpaid creativity, it comes in a lot of forms around the home, as I find my environment affects me strongly when it comes to both creativity and happiness. So things like gardening, decorating, cooking (if I’m not tired or distracted by art!) and journaling all come to mind. I’m also exploring the power of using stories creatively around my life in general, not just in my work. That’s why I’m calling it a quest to find a place where my income comes from art, rather than a goal of building a business as an artist. Questing is so much more exciting than working!

Hamadryad: Oak (an oak nymph)

Do you have any formal training in your creative discipline(s)? Do you feel training is important in creative development? Why/why not?

It depends on what you mean by ‘formal’ training. Do I have a degree or art school education in art? No.

But I have taken many, many day workshops and short courses to learn technical skills and get inspiration from many different teachers, and I currently take a weekly life drawing class, which is challenging and satisfying in equal parts. I guess you could say I’ve built my own curriculum of study over the years.

I definitely would have liked more training on the fine arts side of my skills, but I’m not sure that art school would necessarily have provided what I was looking for. And I suspect I would have chafed against some of the restrictions and requirements of such a discipline!

I do feel training is important – when the person involved craves it. It can provide not only experienced advice and technical skills, but also inspiration and encouragement. But, of course, when it comes down to it, you’re going to have to do you own work some time, and that means blazing your own trail rather than always following the beaten path. (Still with the story metaphor, see?) So the training can only take you so far before you strike out in your own direction and follow your own interests and needs.

From Fi's "Standing Stones" sketchbook

What habits do you cultivate to facilitate your creative “flow”?

This is something I’m still working on, as I transition from a part time job to a full time artist. But there are several things I’ve discovered about my ability to get started on creative projects over the last few years, and I try to encapsulate each one in a little motto as a reminder. Some of these mottoes are:

“Take care of the quantity and let the gods take care of the quality.” A reminder that practice makes perfect and no effort is wasted. It all counts.

“Process not product.” Focusing on just getting on and doing something rather than fretting about what it should be.

“Every piece does not have to be a masterpiece.” A tricky one for anyone with perfectionist tendencies, I usually follow it up with the quantity vs quality motto!

“Stop while you still know where to go.” It’s easier to pick up something when the next step is obvious, so I try to leave things in medias res, rather than at a natural stopping place whenever I can.

“Make bricks before building castles.” I tend to get overwhelmed at the thought of a huge task (like my large piece Pearls of Wisdom), so I break it down into teeny tiny turtle steps and list them out. Then I can concentrate on just one little thing to get done at a time.

And finally, probably my favorite is “Naps are always an option.” Sometimes when everything feels stuck and I’m getting nowhere, the answer is not to push through but to take a break, whether that’s a nap or a refreshing walk or a cup of tea.

"Elemental" - Designed for the Festival of Quilts 2008

What advice would you give to a “blocked” artist in your discipline to free up their creative energies?

Play.

Seriously, play. Get out your cheapest – or most luscious – materials and just play around with them. Doodle, color in, splosh paint or dye around, collage fabric or paper, stitch random designs in lovely colors. Anything that takes the pressure off and reminds you why you love the thing you do. If you can let yourself relax into the physical pleasure of that creative moment, that deep sense of peace and timelessness that overtakes you when you’re creating, you will tap back into the creative part of your mind and start the juices flowing again. Remember: process not product; it all counts!

From Fi's work "We Must Not Look at Goblin Men"

Which artistic project that you are working on excites you the most right now?

I will be selling at my first large craft and design show in about a month, so I’m currently working on a lot of products for that. It’s challenging because in the last few years, I’ve been focused on large, one-off pieces like Pearls of Wisdom and We Must Not Look at Goblin Men, but for this show I’m actively trying to develop smaller, more affordable pieces of both framed art and original gifts that still retain something of the deeper stories I’ve used in my larger works. It’s forcing me to mix stitch and paint in ways I’ve not tried before, to incorporate techniques I’ve only played with, and to work on a completely different scale.

How do you select your creative projects? What elements of a potential project tend to intrigue you the most?

Oh, definitely the stories. In another life, I think I might have been a children’s book illustrator!

I always start with a blank piece of fabric (or paper) and an image in my head, and the image is like a moment from a story, frozen. I like people looking at my work from a distance to be thinking, “What’s going on here?” and to discover more and more detail and meaning as they come closer. That’s why I sometimes include symbols, text and little almost-hidden details as well – because it’s all part of the story behind the image.

Any other advice to artists to help them make their creative activity more satisfying?

Such a big question! I think perhaps the most important thing to remember is that you’re (presumably) doing this because you love it. If you’re not loving it, then something has gone wrong. Maybe you’ve moved too far from what you like doing to what you think will sell or what people expect. Or maybe it’s become about product instead of process. Or maybe you’re just tired and need a break.

Stop, take a breather, and check your internal compass. Are you still blazing your own trail, or following too hard on the footsteps of someone else? Can you still see the sunlit glade ahead of you or does it feel like you’re trudging towards a grim castle shrouded in fog? You can always adjust your path or even change direction entirely.

Remember, this is your story and you get to write it, so make it a good one!