I’m thrilled to be guest-blogging here on Notes on Design! I’m an art director by day, illustrator by night, and hands-on-at-all-times Mama to three preschoolers. This means I am very good at organizing, but I’m ready to get creative at a moment’s notice.

I’m a great believer in keeping your creativity alive by always trying something new to spark your interest. That could range from painting with unusual materials, like wine, or coffee…

Doing fast-and-fluid portraits with your kids’ art supplies while they draw too:

Or bringing your art supplies to capture a moment in the park.

Because I work primarily on the computer at my day job, I try very hard to keep away from the lure of the beguiling “Undo” when it comes to painting. I scan them in and clean them up in Photoshop, and occasionally throw a bit of cross-hatching in there, but on the whole, I really like the idea of keeping it fresh and as close to the original as possible. I also give myself permission to make mistakes, trash a painting if I don’t like it, and repaint the same thing 17 times if that makes me happy.

Along the lines of keeping everything fresh and creative, my project for May is to paint every single day in the month. Check out what other people are creating today on the Every Day In May flickr group. There’s even a site feed! Can you commit to doing one new creative thing every day this month?

Read Elena’s next post

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers, Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.