What do you do to jump start or stretch your creativity?

So this is the question posed by a fab group of jewellers. I am a member of Jewellery Carnival and here are the others

http://lorahartjewels.blogspot.com/

http://www.creativetexturetools.com/news/

http://www.kaskiles.com/

http://www.fleseri.com/blog/

http://angelacrispin.canalblog.com/

http://penny-candies.blogspot.com/

http://gentrydesignco.typepad.com/jewelrydesignchronicles/

http://www.lorrene-davis-designs.blogspot.com

They will all be answering this question today on their blogs, so pop by them all and see what words of wisdom they have, as for me, read on and I will give you my answer.

What do you do to jump start or stretch your creativity?

For me, creativity starts with a question. ( I haven't actually done this in a long while as most of my work nowadays is from direct briefs from clients to make bespoke items. So the inspiration comes from the clients own requirements.)

The question which kick starts my creativity is a simple one. What does X mean? It doesn't really matter what the "X" is so here are some examples

-What is love?
-what is imprisonment?
-What is danger?
-What is pattern?
-What is flight?

The list goes on and you can imply inject the word / phrase/thought that turns you on.

I write the question down , then try to answer it in as many ways as I can, both literally and laterally. I brainstorm the theme and put down on papaer as many ideas as I can about the question.

From those scribbles, I then get a particular part that I would like to explore further.

So just one line of thought might go something like this......

What is flight? - fly-flying-freedom-air-escape-space-sea-we all fly- birds fly in the air- fish fly in the sea- we fly on the ground-to run- to evade- to flee- to be pursued-criminals-police-good-bad-world war II-Nazis-Jews- camps stopped the flight- freedom-we are all free- we are never free- free from work-haave to work- jobs imprison us- the homeless are free- nothing to worry about-worryless-free from concern-happy.

So this is just a very small snapshot of the type of thing I would do. then I find myself focusing on one aspect of the scrawlings. The idea of being fre, having a home and a job, but you aren't really free, you are a prisoner of your financial commitments. You have to work to pay the bills for the home you don't own.

I would then start up a list of things to draw that would help to explore this idea. So homes are our jailors, they allow us out in the morning to go to work to earn the money to pay for them, then we have to go home at night to sleep and they imprison us once more.

so now with an idea I would be out drawing doors, windows, and anything that connected with this thought process of freedom /flight. I might draw a front door, a lock, a window, a commuter, the train station - taking people to work - so that they can pay for their homes.

This would then continue until I am happy that I have a whole bunch of sketches. It might happen over just a day or a week or several months. Then from these drawings, I would start to refine futher sketches until something started to develop. Once I had a drawing that I liked, I would start to mess with materials. paper, string, mud, food, - whatever was required to bring those images to life. These models would then be the 3D starting point to making an item in metal and ultimately into a piece of jewellery.