A Creative’s Guide to Spring Cleaning Yourself.
For me, all of a sudden, it becomes time to spring clean every 1 or 2 months! Spring clean my room, spring clean my cupboard, spring clean my desk, spring clean my ideas but most importantly, spring clean myself! So, here is the creative’s how-to guide on spring cleaning yourself when it is not spring!
Notebooks.
- Buy a new notebook or make one! I recently found this website which makes beautiful notebooks! Here is one I especially loved:
Notebooks always manage to bring out the fountain of creative juices in me which I never knew existed and my random scribbles slowly turn into something meaningful. A new notebook always means a new handwriting, or a new style of writing, trying calligraphy or making lists. This brings us to the next step. What should you try next in your beautiful notebook? Personally this time, I went with Haiku’s. I read a beautiful article on how Courtney Symons wrote one haiku per day and that made me go into this whole notebook full of (not very well written) Haiku’s! (You can read her article here.) So, here is the next point.
Haiku’s.
2. Choose your favorite pen. Sit in a comfy corner and start dreaming. Then jot them down as Haiku’s. In case you wanted to make a newsletter and put them up online as beautiful little pieces of art, here is a link to a website which gives you beautiful templates. Just to add a touch of inspiration, this is one I recently made, I was just jotting down prose poetry that came to mind:
Now that we have got that part out of the way, lets go to the next part of how to spring clean yourself.
Sample Books!
3. Download the Kindle app and browse through the book recommendations. No need to buy them, but do yourself a favor and download samples of all the books that you like. This great feature allows you a bundle of new ideas in no time or cost! Read through the first few pages from books by Authors such as Arundhati Roy, Maggie Nelson, Robin Sharma or few of your favorite authors. Recently I started reading samples of Bluets by Maggie Nelson, where I discover that she has written about the exact same thing that I always say, that She fell in love with the color blue. This in turn led me to her new title, “The Argronaut” which connects together language, love and gender identity in a brilliant, fluid and eloquent manner. This book led me to this other brilliant book called “At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails” by Sarah Bakewell from which I learnt about ideas such as “Phenomenology” and the “Theory of Things”. Coincidentally, I had a houseguest, a fellow PhD student who was a former philosophy student and a current intellectual history scholar, and a mention of this book took us down a very interesting conversation path.
Design something!
4. The computer age has brought so many useful tools to our fingertips! One of them is this wonderful website called Canva which allows you to design beautiful layouts in no time at all. They have a huge selection of amazing templates and free art work which you can use (even though google images is right there in the next tab, you will be spoilt for choice)! So, what are you waiting for? Maybe edit some art work, make a new facebook cover, or use it for your website. If you do not want to do either of these things, then just make a collage of your pictures, add text in all those designs, and print of beautiful greeting cards.
Oh! I almost forgot! You can make your own custom notebook covers and print them all and start your cycle of creativity all over again!
Cellophane Paper Lists.
5. I learnt this technique from some of my juniors. Its a pretty cheap alternative to white boards. If you want to stay away from the hassle of buying a white board, put some transparent cellophane sheets on your wall near your desk, get a whiteboard marker and doodle away!
Red Wine and Coffee!!
6. Last but not the least, this is the personal note part ;) : I love art which features red wine or coffee, in fact, I have several coffee mug art work featured in my room! Here is an example of red wine art:
But the good news is, even if you do not drink either of the above, you should make yourself a mug of steaming hot amazing coffee and keep it on the counter just to get that amazing smell seep into your insides and get you all warm and fuzzy!
Do you have other amazing ideas you would like to add to this list? Comment below and let me know!
