Feed your flow
With Liv Strawbridge
Feed your flow
If the work you’ve been creating feels uninspired and repetitive, and your creative flow feels blocked, it might be time to find some new source material.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist from the Neo-expressionism movement, had effortless flow. He produced work incredibly fast, so much so that Andy Warhol said he was jealous because Basquiat was faster than him.
Source material was a crucial part of Basquiat’s creative process. In fact, one book in particular, Henry Drefuss’ ‘Symbol Sourcebook,’ ended up providing inspiration for almost all of his work. I highly recommend watching this short 8-minute video that shows Basquiat’s creative process and work ethic.
As the video notes, “Most of the flow that you will have while making art will come from all the things you were doing when you were not making art.”
So, take action to feed your flow – buy or borrow some inspirational books, visit a gallery or show, and fill yourself up with a well of new ideas when you're not working. All of a sudden, the most unexpected ideas will start to come out of you when you least expect it.
Remember everything with mymind
I’ve recently been trying out a fantastic new tool called mymind, which was recommended to me by a subscriber (thanks, Sayaka!).
mymind is a smart bookmarking platform where you can gather all your notes, articles, Instagram posts, images, and more in one private space. When you need to find something, you can search by color, keyword, date, or whatever comes to mind first.
My favourite feature so far is the ability to select text from an article and save it to mymind, where it magically organises and visualises the content. It's 100% private, with no ads or notifications - and people with ADD/ADHD are loving it.
I'm looking forward to trying mymind as a mood board for my next logo design project.
It’s free to get started, and you get 100 cards on the free plan.
Not an ad, just a great new tool – I've added it to my toolkit under ‘project management’ :).
Square eraser tool in Illustrator
We know that as a default, the eraser tool in Adobe Illustrator is a circle shape.
But did you know that you can easily change it to a square? Just hold down alt/option and drag where you want it to delete.
A much quicker way to chop out areas than using the rectangle tool and pathfinder!
