Lately I have decided to set up time in my week to get creative, just for fun. After the pre-Christmas rush, I felt a little out of balance creatively and realized I lost very much of my “just do stuff” element, which I had when I was younger. Oh boy. I used to spend entire afternoons splattering my desk with paint, experimenting, making collages and being in a complete trance, losing track of time. Sometimes I ask myself: “Where did all of this go?“. When you are living a lifestyle or doing a job that requires you to be creative pretty much on a daily basis, it’s so easy to lose yourself and get trapped in a to-do list bubble. Of course, I do feel like I’m doing the job that I’ve always dreamt of, but like anything that turns into a profession, it can suck up some precious ressources that were supposed to be there in the first place: inspiration, curiosity, and the ability of just coming up with new ideas and shaping them… Especially NOT being afraid to lose some time trying to experiment, not being afraid to fail at it either. Sometimes everything becomes so systematic and I feel like I need to remind myself what the exact aim of a creative lifestyle is supposed to be. So I set up time to “create”. But even this feels strange sometimes, as I have trouble remembering what it feels like to create without boundaries.

The other day, I sat down at my desk, and thought: “Ok, so now I’m going to take some time for myself and do something creative“. And then my mind ravelled so bad. It was extremely strange. I asked myself so many questions, I didn’t even know how to proceed. I guess I forgot what it feels like to just grasp ONE inspiring thing and do something out of it. But then again, maybe I needed some help with that. In our job, as designers, we are so used to dealing with briefings, guidelines. We set up a theme and then create around it. So I figured out that maybe all I needed was to have a theme!

Thanks to my lovely creative friend Lynn, I found out about this website called “Illustration Friday“. This is a website in which illustrators, creatives and people in general can submit their creations. The cool thing about it is that every week (on fridays) they set a theme to go with. This can be extremely helpful for people (like me), who need some guidelines in order to create. Having a theme in mind can help in setting up a tone, narrowing inspiration down a little bit. Yet, it can also allow freedom and maybe an opportunity to get out of our comfort zones.

This week’s theme is: Orbit. Now THAT definitely got me out of my comfort zone. I love watching the stars and the moon but I’ve never been too passionate about astronomy or anything like that. Well, definitely not enough to draw anything related to it. For a moment I wondered if I should go with this theme or just be a wuss and wait next week to see if the next one is going to be more inspiring. For some reason, (maybe my ego), I decided to go with it anyway, no matter how uncomfortable that made me. I wanted to go with a technique that uses hand-drawn elements. So I started with some dotwork to create some orbits that look like star dust. When I scanned and imported these in, they looked like nothing, but that’s when the real experimenting started, to actually make it look interesting. I tried thousands of ways to bring a little movement, and then I added little planets. I experimented with texture (from scanning in my own inked fingerprints) and that turned out to be a cool way to add depth. I was doing all of that on a light background and then I thought “why not try dark“. All of a sudden, it just came together!

I don’t know if this type of illustration has any recognizable element of my style to it, quite possibly not (as I did get to try many new techniques) – but at the same time, maybe I shouldn’t care about that so much! Maybe being creative is about doing stuff, enjoying the process and not asking ourselves so many questions about the result. What do you think?