Your daily creative prompts for the week are here.
This is the last post with Daily Creative Prompts for a while, but don’t despair, instead we will be sharing our Art Camp at Home posts each day instead. I really encourage you to sign up to this, as you will get bonus inspiration via email, one to one chats available, and reminders and motivation to check in with the posts. However, the general posts will be available to view if you want to dip in and out of it.
For this week, we are trying lots of new things – free writing, origami, and abstract photography – have you done any of these before? We are also going to paint a self portrait inspired by the wonderful Frida Kahlo, and in celebration of the Comet Neowise, we are exploring different ways to paint and make comets!
Do let us know on our Facebook group if you do any of the activities – I love seeing your pictures and hearing what you have been up to!
1. Try Free Writing – Have you done this before? Free writing is a really great activity to get your brain buzzing with thoughts and ideas, and to stop you overthinking and worrying when embarking on creative writing… It is also a great brain dump if you have a lot of worries, ideas, or are feeling confused about a subject or topic. The basic premise is that you write about a certain thing for a set length of time. This length of time will depend upon the age and ability of the person doing the activity. For adults, 15-20 minutes is usually a good time, for children, it will be much less, from 2-10 minutes.
So grab some paper, pen and watch of some kind, pick a topic, and just write. Don’t look up, don’t lift your hand, don’t think too much about it, and just write whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar, structure or anything else, just write. When you are done, you can leave it at that, or you can go on to use what you have written to help another project you have.
2. Make a Self Portrait Inspired by Frida Kahlo – Somehow Frida Kahlo’s birthday slipped out of my radar last week and I forgot to add this prompt to last week’s list! As many of you may know Frida Kahlo was an acclaimed painter, known for her self portraits that are inspired by and infused with nature and cultural artefacts. Her works are often bright, bold and vibrant; exploring her connection to her South American culture, and the natural world around her.
So your challenge is to do the same… can you make a self portrait that uses bright, bold colours, and shows yourself surrounded by things that are important to you? That could be nature or cultural artefacts, or it could be things from your favourite pastimes, favourite foods, animals, anything at all?
Don’t worry about getting the likeness of yourself perfectly correct – this is about expression and colour! Have fun, and share what you make.
3. Paint or Make Comets – Comet Neowise has been streaking across our skies this week, so what better time to have a go at painting or making a comet of your own?
Here are some ideas for you to try:
- Use light and bright pastels or chalks on black paper, smudge the pastels to get that lovely streaky effect.
- Try this this fun Shooting Start Spinner craft from Teach Beside Me
- This tin foil and ribbon craft from SpacePlace is great – we did this at Art Camp last year!
- Be inspired by the Greatest Representations of Comets in the History of Art
4. Try Making Abstract Photographs – Abstract photography isn’t as hard as you may think. You can use your camera phone, or any camera you have lying around, and you don’t need to know any special tricks. Walk around and see what patterns, shapes, colours or textures inspire you – go closer up until whatever the subject is is out of context, and you can just see the lines, colours or whatever it is that interests you. Take some pictures and see what you think…
Now try taking pictures of things that are very far away and examining how abstract you can make them appear. You could use effects on your photo editor to enhance the abstract qualities.
Abstract photography is a great way to learn about composition, colour and texture in photographs, and is lots of fun. Go out and have a go!
This article might give you some more ideas!
5. Try Origami – This prompt comes from Jake, as he is desperate to learn origami and thinks you should too. There are tons of tutorials online. I am not going to even try and teach you how to do it here, because I haven’t a clue, but this post from The Spruce Crafts will help you, as it has 10 Origami Projects for Beginners!
Update – we had a go at a crane, some boats, and a jumping frog this morning, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought! We found the best instructions on Origami.me!
Have a great week! Feel free to let us know what creative pursuits you have been exploring, and share any progress, processs or results with us. If you need any help, support or feedback we are always on hand to help!
