This is the second of five tips on how to increase the speed of your scrapbooking while improving your skill. Click here to read about the first tip.
Tip #2: Spend at least ten to twenty minutes at your scrapbook table everyday.
In her book, The Creative Habit, dancer/choreographer, Twyla Tharp, talks about the blank canvas each of us starts with when beginning to create something. As a renowned dancer, Tharp’s own white canvas has always been an empty dance studio. She tells her story:
“In five weeks I’m flying to Los Angeles with a troupe of six dancers to perform a dance program for eight consecutive evenings in front of twelve hundred people every night. It’s my troupe. I’m the choreographer. I have half of the program in hand–a fifty minute ballet….
“The other half of the program is a mystery. I don’t know what music I’ll be using. I don’t know which dancers I’ll be working with. I have no idea what the costumes will look like, or the lighting, or who will be performing the music. I have no idea of the length of the piece, although it has to be long enough to fill the second half of a full program to give the paying audience its money’s worth.” (pg. 5).
How does an artist create something out of nothing under enormous pressure and little time?
“I’ve worked long enough and produced with sufficient consistency that by now I find not only challenge and trepidation but peace as well as promise in the empty white room. It has become my home.” (pg.6,bold added by me).
Tharp lets us in on the method of those who increase their creativity and learn to create beautiful things with their empty white canvases:
“…the real secret is that they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.” (pg. 6)
Creativity from routine? Creativity from habits? Absolutely. Creativity grows from daily stretching and working. This is why I stress the importance of having a permament table, one that you can go to everyday, even if for only ten minutes. And ten minutes really is a minimum.
I always keep something out on my table to work on. If I finish a layout and my scrapbooking time is over, one of my routines to keep the creative juices flowing is to pull out the next set of pictures or a story I journaled in my notebook, and lay it on my table. That way, my mind is already getting to work on my next project. It is there for me to work on as soon as my next opportunity to sit down and play arises.
My projects are always there in my sight. Creating is always on my mind. Doing it daily keeps the creative organ warmed up, flexible, and strong.
If you do not already spend time creating every single day, I want to challenge you to try it for two weeks. Then, please come back here and tell me what it has done for you.
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