Finding your creative spark using eResources
Published on 19th February 2021
If you are feeling a little blue and need to shake things up, it may help to switch tack and explore your artistic side.
Learn to paint or play a musical instrument on ArtistsWorks or nourish your creative spark at the Design and Crafts Council Ireland YouTube channel with its selection of step-by-step workshops and tutorials in drawing, painting and printing, crafts like knitting or sewing, and creative skills like singing, dancing or baking.
If you are ready to take your creativity to the next level, some of the titles on Borrowbox may help you to find a more reflective or structured approach to releasing your creative force. In Make Time for Creativity, Brandon Stosuy guides you through ways to prioritize your creativity in the context of everyday life. From the perspectives of work-life balance, understanding the value of a daily ritual and setting and meeting goals, he poses questions that enable the reader to establish their own creative frameworks.
A classic of this genre is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in Retirement. This provides the reader with an array of useful strategies for releasing creative potential whilst acknowledging some of the feelings that retirement stirs up, and building confidence to undertake one’s journey into creativity. A useful companion book is The Artist’s Way Workbook - full of tasks, ideas and insights to help you on your way.
Aspiring filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists and designers will find a useful source in Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit by authors Jennifer Leigh Selig, Dennis Patrick Slattery, and Deborah Anne Quibell. The authors are motivated by the idea that it has become increasingly difficult to find space in our lives for practising creativity, and that often the focus is on what we produce rather than on the value of the creative process itself. They aim to help the reader address this imbalance through specific principles and pathways that are both practical and deeply reflective.
On audio book, Meta Wagner takes a different approach. What’s Your Creative Type: Harness the Power of your Artistic Personality focuses on why rather than how people create. She feels that if we can identify who we are creatively, than we can overcome the obstacles that challenge creative energy. Each chapter presents a study of a creative type based on famous artists in a witty and engaging manner that will have a broad appeal. Also very accessible is Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic, in which experienced artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon encourages readers to find their own creative identity and style. Congdon asserts that finding the subject matter, media, markings and symbols that best suit your artistic voice is a little like discovering your own superpower.
Access eBooks/eAudiobooks on your phone, tablet or reader. Once you have installed the app, search for Dublin in the ‘Library’ field provided and then sign in using your library membership card number and PIN.
Watch our how to video on Borrowbox. Members of other library authorities will need to log in using a different link. So what’s stopping you? Take a leap and fulfil your creative potential!
Submitted by Teresa in Pembroke Library.