This month, my goal is to do a Skillshare* course (or part of a course) every day, and blog about it.
Today’s course: Find Your Style: Five Exercises to Unlock Your Creative Identity, taught by Andy J. Pizza
I’m really excited about this one. Locking down my personal style has always been hard for me, whether it’s related to my art/crafting or the way I dress. I have lots of ideas about what I would like my style to be, but I’ve had limited success making personal style happen. I often feel like the styles I like – the ones I like for me, not just “things I like” – are not super compatible (think Betsey Johnson v boxy linen slacks and a flowy silk blouse or the clean lines and symmetry of a mandala vs a surrealist tangle of shape and color creating fantastical creatures and objects).
Loving the idea of “creative DNA” consisting of identity, experience, taste, and experiments. Taste is “…not about skill, but what you can receive” – this might be a game changer for me.
Okay, made it through Exercise One: Your Creative DNA today. The exercise (SPOILER) is to create a wee mood board (6-12 images) for each of the creative DNA components. I don’t have a lot on my “experiments” board, but the rest feel like I’m off to a good start, and I feel like these boards are something I’ll keep adding to. Even just a half hour or so of fleshing them out felt pretty good.
I did these as a Pinterest board with four sections. You can have a look at mine here.
Tomorrow, I’ll start back up again with Exercise Two: Find Your Patterns. So far, I’m really enjoying this course, and I have no idea where I’m going to end up on my creative journey, which is kind of cool.
(As a sidenote, all of these instructors feel really manic to me, and I finally realized that it’s because I’m watching them at 1.5x speed. I like the condensed speed, but also I’m glad I figured out that this “manic” vibe is not necessarily accurate.)
*”Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people, on topics including illustration, design, photography, video, freelancing, and more.” They’ve got classes in everything from art to baking to productivity to gardening to trumpet (I will not subject you to my efforts to relearn the trumpet). Classes range from 20m to a few hours, but even the longer ones are broken into bite-sized chunks. It’s pretty cool.
If you decide you want to sign up and you like me enough to give me a free month, too, here’s my referral link.
This project is in no way endorsed, sponsored, or paid for by Skillshare (afaik, they don’t even know about it).