Turns out Einstein never actually said this, but I still love the message. Fun Fact: I had to write a small text on that quote in German as part of my German course. Es hat Spaß gemacht. Anyway, going off-topic already. 🙄
It is easy to get buried under stress, work, and Excel spreadsheets (looking at you, Macros and Vlookups), that we completely forget to have fun. And honestly? Fun doesn’t have to look like what everyone else is doing for fun, though that can be surprisingly difficult to realize sometimes.
Creativity is the ability to produce or use original, unusual, or imaginative ideas to create something new, unique, or useful.
Cambridge Dictionary
Creativity wears many hats: from being curious about new fun hobbies to even solving complex problems at work or in life. For me, creating serves as a form of therapy. When I am immersed in my creative hobbies, I am empty of stress and thought. Creativity is serving as a physiological “off-switch” that shifts my brain out of fight-or-flight mode.
The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
Julia Cameron
This blog is meant to be about cozy and creative little things, not grand philosophical debates lol, but here we are talking about philosophy and creativity anyway. Is lol a millennial thing? (going off-topic again 😃)
Creative little things
Digital creativity
There is a small corner in the internet (apart from the one you are currently reading this blog post) that is one of the places I’d like to lose track of time. There is a certain serotonin boost that comes from using your morning commute to work to organize your personalized interests into little buckets or boards, rather than reading work emails. It’s called Pinterest! 📌Thisismyland, my Pinterest profile, is the place where many creative ideas are being born way before they become an actual creative little thing; they first become a pin, then a screenshot on my phone, or a note to myself. Small fun fact: Dido’s song “This Land is Mine” was the inspiration for my Pinterest profile name.
Since the technology of electronics has become such an important part of modern life, it is inevitable that it be employed in the creation of art.
-Ben F. Laposky, 1969
Digital creativity lives in so many different spaces across the internet. Canva is another one of those versatile platforms that works beautifully for personal fun or even professional marketing. You know that feeling when you discover a new song and you play it 50 times in a row until you can’t stand it anymore? That was me when I found Canva, except I haven’t gotten tired of it yet, and honestly I don’t think I ever will! Plus, it’s the perfect way to pass the time while on vacation. 😉
Photography is the ultimate bridge between the physical world and the digital canvas. Photography involves the art of noticing things: patterns, light, shadows, nature, and the list goes on. Light coming through the trees can be an example of that, if you have the eye for it. A camera simply captures a moment through the eyes of the photographer behind it. Sometimes, even raw, unedited photos are captivating for that exact reason, because a person saw a fleeting second worth keeping and chose to click the shutter.
Tree stump drenched in the midday light, as captured by me.🪵
Analog creativity
Leaving in a fully digital world filled with doom scrolling, reels, and social media posts, it’s a sort of rebellion logging out, putting the phone down, and working with your hands. Whether you choose watercolor painting, sculpting, or scrapbooking, the common denominator is this: you can’t check your phone when your fingers are covered in wet paint, clay, or glue. Scrapbooking is my favorite currently. Let’s talk about it.
In the scrapbooking or junk journaling world, common trash becomes treasure. Think about museum or train tickets, restaurant bill receipts, brochures, or newspapers. They become memorabilia glued on a notebook to be kept forever. Each page or collage is a different memory or a different inspiration. Most of the time scrapbooking is gluing paper down one piece at a time until the final result satisfies me. Adding stickers, washi tape, or stamps, and collaging things onto a notebook page is a return to my childhood. That’s where all started: using big A3 colorful carton-like papers in middle school to do collages by adding different colors, drawing with pencils, or gluing different textured papers down.
The Art of Creativity is a delicate balance between Chaos & Order.
Unknown
It usually starts with scraps of paper, receipts, postcards, etc.
After a lot of thinking, trying, and fingers covered in glue, the result is more than satisfying.
Each page holds a different memory, a different style, or a theme. I start with a blank page first. I search for the right materials, papers, or scraps that fit my mood. In October, the theme may be autumn. In July, it may be summer. Or the opposite. There are no rules, and that is very freeing. It’s one of my favorite things to do while a movie or a show is playing in the background or while nibbling on something chocolatey. 😎
Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.
Tim Burton
Apart from scrapbooking, something I have been exploring for the last few months is watercolor painting. I found a watercolor course I enjoy going back to weekly. The materials are provided by the studio, and similarly the theme of the week. I get to just show up every week to learn, make mistakes, experiment with different colors, or simply enjoy the process. It’s a joy seeing the result after two hours of mostly not knowing what I am doing, lol. And believe me, most of the time, the empty paper or canvas scares me. I still find the pencil sketching before using watercolors the trickiest part of the process. I am still learning to trust the process step by step. The reward at the end is that I get to take home the art piece that I made with my own hands. Every finished piece is a reminder that acting on my creativity that day was a form of self-love. I get to collect all of them in a massive A3 archive folder, which I’ll definitely have to tell you all about in another post. 😊
made by me 🙂
Maybe that is what creativity has become for me lately: not something I have to be particularly good at, but something I make space for.
A Tuesday evening with watercolours, a photograph I want to keep, or a scrapbook page made slowly at home. None of it has to be perfect or especially important. It just has to make me stop for a moment, notice the little things, and enjoy making something with my own hands.
And perhaps that is reason enough to keep doing it.
