Misha Collins recently posted that it was the first day of his last hiatus from filming Supernatural – my absolute favourite show. However, it seems that my creative mojo has decided that he needed some company!
I think most people who create encounter dry spells in some form or other (I truly envy you if you don’t!) I’ve always been an extremist, being at either one end of a spectrum or the other, and rarely in between (although I am trying to learn to step into the grey). My creativity – sadly – isn’t an exception. Some nights my brain is bombarded with a myriad of ideas, like an overflowing river – so fast that my hand can’t keep up with it as I scramble to grab my pencil and paper and scribble furiously, trying my best to write my ideas down in a manner that will still make sense come morning.
Then there are times like now – when ideas are like the smattering of trees in an otherwise dry and barren region of the Australian outback in the height of summer. I have discovered that very often, these times usually coincide with having a lot on at the time. My theory is that my left brain goes into overdrive (think Turbo after NOS) and my poor right brain is left in the dust (Turbo before NOS). However, extended periods spent not creating and crafting puts me on edge and makes me really restless, some might even say irritable *coughs and splutters*. It’s at times like these that I look for some NOS for poor Turbo stuck at the starting line, and I find it in the form of card sketches.
Card sketches are like blueprints for cardmaking. It shows the layout of the card and where elements such as card, mats (if any), patterned paper, ribbon and borders go. I find that breaking down a card to its bare bones helps me a lot because I only make one decision at a time and then further build on the selected option. Some days I still struggle with this thanks to the brain fog that most of us receive as a free gift with compliments from fibromyalgia (we’d absolutely love to return it if we could), so breaking decisions to chihuahua-sized bite pieces such as, “square card or rectangle card?”, “embossed or not?”, “this paper or that?” helps me tremendously as I feel like I am moving forward, even if it’s only by a fraction of an inch.
There are many blogs already devoted to card sketches. A simple search in a search engine or on Pinterest would bring up a host of possibilities, but these are the ones I keep coming back to. I’ll try to remember amidst the brain fog to update this list if I find more that I use.
The past week has been really hectic in my head, and although I got a lot of colouring done and created toppers for cards, my list of cards to make for family for Easter, Mother’s Day and other occasions wasn’t getting any shorter. I flipped through some sketches and found one that spoke to me at the time. And what do you know? I’ve struck my auntie’s birthday card off my list and this is the end result.
Bear Digi Stamp – Teddy Bear Picking Flowers by The Paper Shelter, coloured with Copics
Patterned Papers – Echo Park Springtime Paper/Elements Pack 1 and Pack 2
I’d like to enter this project for the following challenges:
Use Your Stuff Challenge #353 – Fuzzy Wuzzy
Papercraft Challenges #34 – Polka Dots
Papercraft Challenge #17 – Anything Goes
Outlawz Saturday Paper A La Mode (Mar 30 – Apr 12) – Non-rectangle Card
That old adage – “Fake it till you make it”? Sometimes that is exactly what I do. Guess some old wives were wise after all, and no, I didn’t mean me! 🙂
Till my next project!
Shazza J Creations 