Jillian Tamaki, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and art instructor, recently posted an elegant essay on her personal creative process, explaining step by step how she creates her work and offering advice to those who hope to be effective artists.

Step One, the most important, is "Be interested." Everyone, artists and appreciators alike, should be aware of the aesthetic qualities of the world around you and also of the world that came before. "You might be surprised to learn that your favourite artist is really a knockoff of someone from 100 years ago."

The essay is an excellent insight into not only the creative process of an artist, but also the process behind appreciating art and creativity. Her advice boils down to one straightforward concept: "The viewer should be charmed, intrigued, empathetic, repulsed, provoked. SOMETHING. They should be touched enough to want to cut the illustration out of the magazine." It really is as simple as that.

(Thanks, Drawn!)

Image courtesy of  lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

A good pen doesn’t make your ideas any better, it just makes them easier to put on paper. No matter how snobbish they are about their writing utensils, most writers don’t have the cash to drop on testing out new kinds. The Pen Addict blog lets people know exactly what they’re getting into, writing reviews of with the actual pens in question.

(Thanks, The Morning News.)

Image courtesy of the Pen Addict.

Freelance writing can be detrimental to your health: “There were deadlines to be met, revisions to be made, clients to be satisfied,” explains John Schaidler in the May-June 2008 issue of A View from the Loft (article not available online). “And the only way to do that, as they say, was to apply ‘seat of the pants to seat of the chair.’ ”

After a stern warning from his doctor, however, Schaidler put on the old running shoes—and promptly discovered that exercise can be as beneficial to the creative process as it is to the body. “I turned and ran back home, my brain buzzing with ideas. I shot through the door, went straight to my desk, and wrote for an hour. It was bliss. At least, it was, until I tried to stand and immediately crumpled to the floor, my legs crippled by lactic acid.”

Schaidler doesn’t claim to be the first creative type to discover the mind-sharpening benefits of sweatin’ to the oldies, just an enthusiastic convert. “Evidence says even the most basic exercise program, even walking, will boost your creativity and provide direct benefits to your work,” he writes.

Image by  Scott Ableman , licensed under Creative Commons.

Understanding seasonal cycles can lead to more creativity and more original ideas, according to an article in Kosmos Journal. The seasons provide a framework for understanding how to develop ideas, especially in academic work. Autumn is the time for active seed planting (both intellectual and actual seeds), winter provides a period of rest and gestation, spring is when new life and ideas emerge, and summer is the time to gather physical or intellectual fruits. Many people fail to honor the individual rhythms of scholastic work in Western academia, the authors argue, especially when educators insist that students work on collective, rigid deadlines. People also tend to shortchange the “feminine” seasons of winter and spring, curtailing the true creative process by rushing from literature review to writing without allowing a patient pause for new ideas to grow. As a result, academics are left with “‘second-order’ creativity or smart mental permutation of already known ideas” and a dearth of innovation.

—Lisa Gulya

Image by Keith Hall, licensed under Creative Commons.