Creative Processes For A Spoon Angel By Kim Dellow

Hey Craft Stamper Magazine Blog readers, Kim Dellow here to pick your creative brains... do you ever think about your creative process? How do you go about creating your art and craft projects? Perhaps you are a thinker, you like to think each stage through before starting out? Or maybe you are a do-er and just get stuck in? Or maybe different projects require different strategies? 

As you can probably gather I think about my creative process a lot, perhaps too much, and I thought that it would be fun to share with you some of my creative process involved in putting together the recent Around The House article I made for the March 2014 issue of Craft Stamper Magazine.

I tend to do a lot of my creating to a deadline and creating to a deadline has its own challenges as I'm sure you know. For me I find that spending a bit of time generating ideas for a project, noting them down and sketching them out, usually helps. So my starting place is my A4 work diary/ideas book and some rough sketches and idea generation jottings. Coming up with colour combo ideas for the finished piece at this point also helps me to visualise the piece in my head.

Once I have some ideas sketched out I will start the experimental stage of the process. Just because I have an idea or two it doesn't mean that they are going to be the finished project, so now is the time to do a few trials. Sometimes I will have the experiments fleshed out already and will be working from something that I've tried before and I'm just adapting it to work with the new idea. In the case of the Spoon Angel article, I wanted to work through some of the stages before committing to the canvas.

The perfect place to do some of these experiments is one of my many art journals. I had already decided which stamps I wanted to use but I wasn't fixed on which masks I wanted to use to build up my coloured layers. I also had a basic colour scheme, I knew that I wanted to work in the warm colours and have a cool colour counterpoint but I wasn't sure which colours I wanted to use for which layers or what inks to stamp with. 

The experimental journal page doesn't look pretty and isn't well designed but it does give me a good idea of how I want to go forward with the project, what I want to use, what I don't want to use, and I'm ready to go ahead and commit to the piece. But as with all creative works the piece still evolves and changes as I work through the layers. For example when I started the piece I had not envisioned that I would use black ink on all the edges to bring unity and harmony to the project, but as I got to that stage it just felt right to use the black.

That is all the fun of the creative process, watching how a project changes and develops from that first concept in your head to the finished piece, and I love it!

So what are your creative processes? How do you put your projects together and do you find you have different processes and strategies for when you are working to a deadline compared to when you are just free to play? 

I would love it if you could spend a little time to share some of your creative processes in the comments below or leave a comment on my blog.

Thanks for popping by.

Kim