TRANSCRIPT

Hello lovely creative, we're back on day two of Light Up Your Creative Joy and today I'm going to invite you to make a map of your many passions. So hopefully after yesterday you've had a wonderful time making your inspiration board and it's now full of images that you find beautiful, maybe objects that you'd like to own, things that you'd like to do, places that you'd like to go, And so today we're going to be looking at how your inspiration board can be used to help you identify what matters most to you in your creative journey at the moment.

Yesterday's activity was all about opening up what inspires and excites you and I hope when you look at your inspiration board you can see the strands of who you are and the things that you care about all flow within it.

But of course creativity is also about taking action. Even if they're imperfect actions, they help you to develop your understanding, develop your skill, and develop your creative confidence. However, especially if you're a multi passionate creative, it can sometimes feel like you either need to choose one thing to focus on and develop, or you end up trying to create all sorts of different things at the same time, and that can lead to overwhelm.

We're often made to feel that the way to develop our creativity is to choose one thing and just give that all of our focus and attention until we've mastered it. But it's just not the truth for a lot of people. The truth is we all connect to our creative passions in different ways.

Some of us are most creative if we're focusing on one art form, while other people like to rotate two or three. For some people having an assortment of projects they can choose from works for them best because they can find what aligns with their energy at the time, and for other people moving through projects quickly and rapidly but like never looking back is more their personal creative rhythm.

So using my own creative practice and example here, I'm really lit up by learning new things. So I always have loads of different projects on the go. There are so many things I want to explore. However, I learned a long time ago that if I try and do all of those things at the same time, I end up spread far too thinly.

And I end up with way too many unfinished projects. Instead, I found that what works best for me is if I have a few of my creative interests in my focus, and then others are in the periphery waiting for their time when I can develop them more. So I was struggling to explain this very well to people and so I ended up trying to think of a metaphor that would represent it instead.

And so for me, the perfect image of my creative world is something that appeared on my inspiration board, a solar system. With my creative joy at the sun at the center, I mapped out which of my passions are currently, like, close to the sun, they're things that are in focus for me at the moment, and which are further on their orbit, they're things that maybe I've been interested in and they're moving away, or they're things that are moving into my focus.

And then I also had stars, which represent things that maybe I've done in the past, or I want to do in the future, but they're not things I'm actively working on right now.

So I call this creative passion mapping. It's a way of creating a visual reference where you're not only showing the activities or the mediums that you're interested in, but you're representing how important each of those feels to you right now. And right now is important because of course this can change over time.

Today we're going to be making a map of where your passions are today, but next week it might look different.

So let's talk about how we can make a creative passion map which visually represents your many passions and how engaged you feel with each of them at the moment. So how you do this is of course up to you. I don't give out prescriptive activities because I think you need to channel it in a way that feels like it aligns with you and your interests.

The simplest approach if you're not sure where to begin would be to take a piece of paper and make a mind map, so write something in the center, my passion map, my creative joy, and then just have things that interest you coming off that. Or you could write down the things that you're interested in, the different mediums or the different craft forms you want to explore, cut them up and then move them around on the table until you find a layout that feels right for you.

For my passion map today, I've used Canva again, simply because I could do that last night while I was watching the telly. And so I've got this solar system with kind of moon and star imagery. But you could also use all sorts of different graphics and images or stock images that you find.

Or if you prefer to do something more tactile, you could paint your creative passion map, or you could make a collage, maybe even using found images in magazines, or printing out images from your inspiration board to put on.

The most important thing about this activity is that it's something that feels fun and easy and interesting to you because otherwise it's just going to be a slog and we really don't want to feel frustrated and bored while we're trying to map out our many passions. And remember if something isn't at the center or it isn't the biggest thing on your creative passion map, that doesn't mean it's not important or it won't become important and have a bigger role to play in your creative future.

The intention of this activity is really just to give you the space to look at where you are with your many creative passions because we often get encouraged in our specialist obsessed culture to not do that to find the one thing we want to do right now and this is more to give you an overview of your creative ecosystem to help you see where you are today and where you might be going.

So I hope you enjoy making your creative passion map. I would love to see them. If you want to email them to me that would be amazing. But otherwise, I will see you tomorrow for day three. Goodbye.