Step Into the Unknown
A creative prompt for letting go.
Welcome to the weekend Creative Fuel prompt!
I treat these prompts kind of like a creative prompt deck. When you open up your email it’s like pulling a new card… creative inspiration for however you want to take it. I send these out every weekend to paid subscribers, but today’s is for everyone. If you want to continue getting these weekly prompts and help to support the work behind this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I’m teaching a workshop this weekend that’s entirely devoted to freeform papercutting. In other words: no drawing, no mapping out a composition, just cutting and seeing what happens. This is a way that I like to work, because it helps facilitate a feeling of creative flow, but I’ve never taught it before and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
In teaching, I have found that following a set of instructions, or a specific project, is usually pretty straightforward for people. It’s a reliable way to teach, and it makes students feel successful. After all, we like to know what we’re doing, so it feels good to work towards an agreed upon end-point.
Embarking on something that doesn’t have a set destination? That’s a little more uncomfortable, and it’s often a more difficult space to navigate.
Guidelines, rules, steps, directions, and patterns all give us a structure to abide by. When you follow them and things don’t turn out the way you wanted, you can blame the structure: “it wasn’t me, the instructions were bad!”
When you start from a more freeform place, one where you abide by the unexpected and the unknown, you take ownership of what happens. If you feel a sense of failure, there is nowhere else for that blame to go. That vulnerability is often a scarier place to be, and it means that a lot of us avoid venturing there.
This place requires us to be kinder to ourselves, to detach ourselves from the end result. It requires more experimentation, more looseness, more lightness.
I like to think of it as the difference between using a pen and a pencil. With a pencil, you can erase, you can start over. With a pen on the other hand, you have to commit, and whatever is on the page is on the page permanently. You’re forced to work with whatever line you have put down, you have to adjust and adapt depending on what’s there. No erasing, no turning back.
I took a painting workshop the other day with Dave Muller through Case for Making. It was a class all about atmospheres, so lots of moody skies. But it wasn’t a step-by-step overview on how to paint a certain cloud. Instead, it was very much a workshop about letting go and letting the work be what it wanted to be. Starting with some paint, putting it on the paper, paying attention to how it reacted, and responding accordingly. A lesson in detaching from what we wanted the watercolor to look like, or what we thought it “should” be, and embracing the unexpected.
To really be able to sit in that place of unknowing requires work. Letting go and seeing what happens requires its own kind of discipline. It requires practice.
Yes, that’s a practice that’s essential for creativity, but it’s a practice that informs all parts of our lives.
What do we do when we can’t see the destination?
What do we do when there are no directions to follow?
What do we do when we lose the map?
What do we do when we can’t erase?
What do we do in the blank space?
I think that tapping into that uncomfortable unknown space in our creative work helps to build resilience. Do it a few times and come out on the other side and you start to think, “well, I guess this isn’t so bad.”
As we work at that resilience, we may start to find that it seeps into other parts of our lives, a reminder that unknowns are inevitable, but we have the creative capacity to work through them.
CREATIVE PROMPT
Remove the guidelines.
Guidelines1 are all around us. Essentially anything that provides form and structure, or ask that we follow a certain format.
What happens when you opt out of them? What happens when you let go? What happens when you commit to something more freeform?
As always, take this to mean whatever you need it to mean.
Previous prompts can be found here.
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I really, really love that watercolor you did. 💚
Interesting comment about pink. It looks great in your watercolor, and, since pink is light red, which is the compliment of green, pink and green play beautifully off each other. In fact, it’s one of my favorite color schemes!