Andy Neal - Creativity Begins With You: 31 Practical Workshops to Explore Your Creative Potential

Andy Neal & Dion Star

BEGINS

WITH

YOU

31 practical workshops to explore your creative potential

Laurence King
An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd
www.laurenceking.com/student/

Published in Great Britain by

Laurence King Student & Professional

An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

2022 Andy Neal and Dion Star

The moral right of Andy Neal and Dion Star to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

TBP ISBN 978-1-52942-022-7

E-BOOK ISBN 978-1-52942-023-4

Quercus Editions Ltd hereby exclude all liability to the extent permitted by law for any errors or omissions in this book and for any loss, damage or expense (whether direct or indirect) suffered by a third party relying on any information contained in this book.

Design of print edition: Blok Graphic, London

Think about where you come from. Who you are. Your interests. What drives you, and the people or things that make you come alive. Consider your previous creative experience (or lack of). Your personality. Your ego. You the introvert. You the extrovert. Your visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning preferences, or the profound existential questions that resonate with you. All of these things (and many, many more) position you as a one-of-a-kind, creative powerhouse that needs winding up and setting in motion.

The majority of us spend more time consuming than creating, yet creative expression is essential for us all to the point that our happiness depends on it. To view creativity as innate talent or as a superpower only present in certain artistic individuals is a mistake. Those of us in the creative industries the so-called professionals may be more practised at applying our creative intuition, but everyone has the capacity for creativity, and nurturing your creative abilities constitutes a core component of your overall growth as a person.

Our shared interest in creativity and creative processes evolved from our own education and the environment that was the traditional British art school. We both benefitted from tutors who revelled in provocation, who would push, challenge and encourage us way beyond what felt comfortable. The result was a growing fascination with the question of why (rather than what), and the creative journey itself became more important than the destination. This became evident both in the development of our own work and in what we observed of the underlying processes of the artists and designers we admired. Over time, outcomes became a by-product of a process of exploration that was far more interesting, so it was no real surprise that we both ended up working in education where questions are often more prevalent than answers. Getting inside the head of a student to help them untangle their thinking was far more satisfying than any final solution to a given problem. The outcome would grow old; the learning would last forever. The making, the journey, the wrestling and tension is, for us, where the real action is design as a verb, rather than a noun.

Over the past decade, this interest has developed into a more overt pursuit of understanding the place of creativity and process in our teaching, which has led to workshops seeking to frame each students working methodology as the main event, rather than considering their process as a means to an end. What if the way you worked as a designer, or writer, or architect became the object of self-study exploring something more profound than the pursuit of developing a logo, or story, or building? What would you notice? What would surprise or shock you? What would you want to change or protect?

Creativity Begins with You started as a series of informal learning experiments with design students. We pooled our collective observations to that point, and invited individuals to reflect on their existing practice and to propose alternative versions of their future selves. Over time, the experiments grew and developed into a body of work that seemed to have an emerging centre of gravity. There was a constellation of creative possibilities surrounding every students practice, and the sessions sought to empower and equip them with an ever-expanding pool of materials and methods to refer to whenever they felt stuck, uninspired or hindered by self-doubt.

The material in this book is, therefore, part practical workshop, part provocative guide, part theoretical conversation, and is based on our experiences and observations from those early experiments onwards. Just as there can never be enough songs (or novels, or typefaces, or paintings) in the world, this book seeks to add to the conversation around creativity in a way that places you in the middle of the picture, working outwards from there.

We started writing this book with an underlying belief that creativity is not primarily something we learn; it is something we are. We are often taught (albeit indirectly) that creativity is something you either have or dont have, and this forms a belief that has a significant bearing on our ability to function creatively in the long term; many people will write themselves off simply because they were told they couldnt draw at school. If you can take the step of trusting that you are inherently creative, regardless of how you feel, you can then learn practices and principles that will encourage and grow your ability for creativity. You may have further to travel than the seasoned professional, but know that youre already on the road, with an innate capacity to move.

Creativity is a generative behaviour that springs from a unique combination of factors directly hardwired to our identity. It looks different from person to person, and it evolves as we grow. Our emphasis, therefore, is not so much on your capacity to learn something its on the conditions and environments that shape whats already there. If you fundamentally believe that youre not creative, you have established an immovable mountain that you will have no ambition even to begin to climb. Similarly, if you do believe you are (to a greater or lesser degree) creative but spend huge amounts of energy trying to be more so, youre probably asking the wrong questions and needlessly exhausting yourself.

You must not trample on other peoples secret gardens. You must remember: to suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

Robert Doisneau

For many of us, however (and despite our combined efforts over the last century to capture what it is), creativity still sits more comfortably in the unknowable realm a mystery. Its something we live out day by day, as an extension of life seen from a unique perspective, which goes some way to explaining why we have such a hard time tying it down.