Unplanned Improvisation

This week for my creativity challenge, I decided to explore one of my strengths and push myself further than I have before. Spatial intelligence was one of my strengths, and I think that contributes to painting being one of my hobbies. I normally work with watercolors on watercolor paper, so for this creativity challenge I decided to push myself and try something I’ve never done before. I decided to paint a friend’s Hydro Flask. They gave me complete freedom and I ended up painting a mountain range around the bottom third of the bottle.

Before I started, I got all my materials together. This included all my rarely-used acrylic paints, a jar of water, many paper towels, several brushes really meant more for watercolors, a small piece of canvas for a practice run, a palette for mixing paints, and the water bottle itself.

The first thing I did was find an image to use as inspiration. I sketched some mountains on my small piece of canvas and got to work painting them. I quickly realized I was way out of my depth. I don’t do a lot of work with acrylic paints and I struggled at first with all the different colors and shading. Watercolors are much more flexible in that you can kind of move them around a little on the paper before they dry completely. They’re also much more transparent than acrylics. Acrylics are a lot more… permanent. As I struggled with this small practice piece, doubts began to creep in and the weight of painting something that someone was going to carry around with them daily felt crushing.

I eventually decided that the best course of action would be to trust in my abilities a little more, give up on the idea I had tried in practice, and just go for it. Still a little unsure and a little haphazard, I started painting the Hydro Flask. Acrylic paints can cover each other very well, a lot better than watercolors can. Because of this, I started with the sky for the background. I used a paintbrush and then a more textured foam brush to help the sky color fade into white. Then, without even so much as sketching in some of the mountains with a pencil, I started painting. I ended up with a collection of overlapping grey mountains waiting for me to go in with a highlight color and give them some definition.

Though I was skeptical and fearful at the beginning of this challenge, I actually ended up with something that I am proud of and that the person I painted it for really likes. After they approved the final paint job, I coated the bottle with a matte sealing spray so that it could hopefully withstand some wear and tear. The final product:

This experience reminded me above all that I need to trust myself a bit more and try to break the mold of my normal creative process more often. I tend to spend a long time planning, sketching, and setting myself up as well as I possibly can to actually create. However, sometimes this actually creates more of a roadblock than I think. While creativity can be planned and measured, I think it is also important to access a looser side of creativity. Creativity can be spontaneous, wild, imperfect, and emotional. This experience made me realize that I want to foster both kinds of creativity in my future classroom. It also tied into a couple of the readings for this week, notably chapter 6 of Wired to Create, about openness to new experiences. Giving students these kinds of opportunities at school can help with their creative development, as “we need new and unusual experiences to think differently. In fact, cultivating a mind-set that is open and explorative might be the best thing we can do for our creative work” (Kaufman). Cultivating that kind of mind-set in our students is imperative to helping them become comfortable with being creative. This process likely won’t happen without some discomfort, but I bet it’d be worth it.

In terms of how to implement something like that, I once again turn to design thinking, and to Daniel Pink’s work on getting to a flow state. As a teacher, I’d want to set aside a bit of time during the day to allow my students to do something they really enjoy that might put them in a flow state. One of the important things to remember about this is that different people have different activities that will put them in a flow state. For example, one student may find themself in a flow state while they play soccer, and another while they draw. Allowing students to explore different things can help them find the perfect activity, where “the relationship between what a person [has] to do and what [they can] do [is] perfect. The challenge [can’t be] too easy. Nor [could it be] too difficult” (Pink). To me, this is all justification for having some less-structured, spontaneous, creative time each day with students. Helping students be more open to new experiences and helping them find the things that make them passionate and get them into a flow state is an important part of elementary education that shouldn’t just be left to happen on its own. One slightly more involved design thinking exercise comes to mind when thinking about how to encourage this kind of creativity in the classroom. While I was unable to find the original source of this exercise, I did want to include this list of 10 design thinking activities of varying degrees of difficulty. If you are a teacher who is down to leave some of the design of the physical space in your classroom up to your students, this activity is perfect. Dubbed the Classroom Redesign activity (by me), this activity encourages students to get involved in creating a classroom space conducive to their learning. I’ve included a full explanation taken straight from the pages of my senior design thesis. In short, this project asks students to think about the things they do in their classroom and gives them complete freedom to come up with a new design that functions well for their needs. The project can be adapted so that their classroom designs serve different purposes; for example, one student can come up with a classroom design that would be best for facilitating creativity and another could work on a design that would best facilitate collaboration.

I learned a lot from this creativity challenge, but my ultimate takeaway is that I want to create a classroom environment that fosters both controlled, measured creativity and spontaneous, loose creativity so that my students become comfortable with both. To me, openness to new activities, getting into a flow state, and design thinking challenges are all factors in creating that kind of environment.

References

Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired To Create. Tarcherperigee. 2016.

Pink, Daniel. Drive. Riverhead Books, New York City. 2009.