- Retake your photos from more controversial angles. This helps especially when you are experiencing a brain fog and cannot see the way out. No pun intended.
- Brainstorm a list of trigger words or phrases and let it guide your next direction.
- Meticulously observe reflections, shadows and lightings. You will find magic lurking in the ordinary.
- Study the intricacies of the weather conditions. Marvel at the rich violet hues at sundown of the tender clouds that smile back down on you on a gloriously sunny day, taking on the most incredible shapes of your wildest imaginings.
- Create an illogical jigsaw. People say that things sometimes fall apart so that better things can fall together. Break the rules. Reshuffle an object. You might like what you see.
- Zoom in at a different distance for a bunch of images and study them from a different distance. Approach your object as if with caution. After all, your muse could be dangerous.
- Blur the lines between the real and the unreal. Show a two-dimensional illustration coming to life. Reduce tangible items to become flat, two-dimensional images. Open the window to the impossible.
- Seek silhouettes. It’s not always true what matters is on the inside. Sometimes the outside matters too. Just look at how Keith Haring creates his mini little human village cheerfully outlined with bold colours. Scrutinise the outline of everything. Buses, shoes, a hamburger, toys and so on so forth.
- Subtraction. Deduct. Stylise. Sometimes less is more. Through simplification, you could reach a myriad of other effects such as cubism, pop art , doodles, illustrations, etc.
- Give non-conventional mediums a chance. Coffee, baking soda, shaving foam, food colouring. Make your kitchen your art studio. Cook up your appetite for creativity.
- Create a motif from a trigger object.
- Filter it. Filters make anything look better. Try out fun filters on your mobile phone and let yourself stand in awe of the amazing effects that you discover.
- Change the state of something. Burn, melt, condense and solidify. Dali melted his clock. What are you known for?
- Increase / Decrease. Manipulate sizes of elements in a sequential order from big to small, or small to big.
- Bloom / Radiate / Spiralise. Flowers bloom, but in the world of Art, anything can blossom. A tray of donuts, a blooming hairdo or a bouquet of lemons.
- Tear / Crumple / Burn. Get into destructive mode. Knock yourself out.
- Turn a different page. Be creative with the paper of your choice. Play with colour , texture, ready-made patterns, or even go for newspapers or magazine cutouts.
- Repeat. Echo the presence of an element so that it becomes a backdrop or a pattern.
- Branch out your idea methodically. Follow the natural consequence of things when expanding your idea. If you are looking at shoes, you could study footprints. Where would your footprints lead to? Question everything.
- Metamorphosize. Document the process of change. A cocoon becomes a butterfly, a seedling grows, a person’s life cycle is unveiled, a Christmas gift is unboxed, the journey of a traveler that is documented. Embrace the magic of transformation.
- Play hide and seek with frames. Play peekaboo with strategically places borders. Who said frames need to only be at the edge? Expand your mental boundaries.
- Tell a story. Create a narrative. Direct your own movie. After all ,a picture paints a thousand words. Someone is waiting to hear it.
- Play with lenses. Fisheyes, concaves, prisms, panorama. Life is not a bed of roses, but it can certainly seem like one through rose tinted glasses.
- Explore interesting textures. What would happen to a world with a scaly kittens, village hut with chrome finish or lipsticks with bubble-like textures?
- Make the mundane epic, and the epic mundane. Elevate the overlooked and diminish grandeur? The world is at your fingertips.
- Dream. Enter the world of the surreal. Juxtapose things that do not make sense together. Put that elephant in the room. Who cares if it gets awkward?
- Mix up the mediums. Pollock used a melting pot of mediums such as cigarette butts , nails , thumbtacks, buttons, coins and a key. (conventional or just plain weird, I am not going to get too ‘judgey.’
- Explore the passage of time. Decay, decomposition, the loss of youth, the dereliction of a mansion, the transition of day to night, summer to winter, etc. Time and tide waits for no man, so why not immortalise the elusive quality of time on your canvas?
- Morph two items together. Two heads, after all, are always better than one.
- Text it. Who could live in this generation without texting as a form of communication? Caption your story. Your message will be received loud and clear.
- Reinterprete an iconic artwork. Repurpose the swirls or yellow-blue palette of Van Gogh. Transport the Mona Lisa from the Tuscan landscape of the Renaissance to an urban contemporary setting. Rethink the primary colours of Mondrian’s abstract pieces. After all, didn’t Picasso once say that ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal?’.
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