Today it was time for "the Robot workshop" again. I brought it to a friends house since her son is obsessed with robots:) We made robots out of copied black and white pics from photos of electronic devices of all kinds, like control panels and parts of cameras, toy cars and speakers...Mixed it together in all kinds of combinations and made our own personal collage robots.

Another assignment in my abstraction program today. Assignment no 13. Choose 5-10 pictures that you find interesting. (don´t care about why or anything....) Draw them, mainly by outlines, one at a time, about 30-60 seconds each, put them all on the same paper and let the picture develop while drawing. Try not to think too much. Just do. When the composition is ready feel free to color it, or not. This is an exercise that I often did before, but haven´t done so much lately, -i

....And here is something more about endorphins and creativity. But the other way around. But I still stink it can work both ways, either creativity OR endorphins release first.... Anyway, -this was an interesting article that I came across just now, Saying: The Benefits of Integrating Creativity in Healthcare I have been studying and researching the effects of creativity and the arts in healthcare for years. The information presented below is culled from evidence-based resea

One thing that I do, when can´t find any inspiration to be creative is to take a cold bath in the temporary summer pool in the garden or in the lake near the cottage during our summer vacation. Today we started the pool season, so it was a good chance for me to kick start my brain for creative thinking. It was quite cold and gave me a real good endorphine shower!!! I jumped out of the pool as a new person and barged up to the studio, to write down some ideas that came to me i

I tried exercise 12, -to make compositions out of silhouettes of people, and merge them together, sp that they should look like an interesting crowd or something. But the elements that I used were too alike and I did´t got any inspiration out of it. I think I´m gonna try to vary both people and things, and merge them together in a more unorthodox way next time. But failing is also learning..

Today I brought the exercise to a friends house as we were having a workshop anyway. We started out with my daily assignment which was to connect randomly placed dots on a paper. One each. We both used wax crayons, but acrylic, aquarelle etc would probably work just as good. It sure was a good starter for a workshop.

And today it was time for assignment number 10. Getting used to it now. But not TOO used to it. Just trying to start a new habit and to keep it running. Today´s assignment was to pick a picture, preferably from my family album and make an abstract version of it. As abstract as possible and still keeping it´s spirit, and as simple as possible but still interesting. I found a landscape without any people in it, and started from there. It was cliffs and sea. I was about to give

I visited a colleague today and we had a workshop that was really cool. We used the same main colors and one canvas on each easel and placed them back to back so none of us could se what the other one was painting. Then we took turn to paint" first" telling the other what was created on the canvas by telling it in adjectives and metaphors. And so we changed and it was the other one´s turn to lead and tell.

....and the exercise (no 9) of today was to draw something from many different angles but to merge it all together in one multi faceted shape. I only drew the outlines of the different angles of the subject as I turned it around a bit at a time. But the final result was more interesting that if I had just been drawing it in one angle in a more traditional way.

And so the vernissage passed, and I had some time to rest this Sunday. Tomorrow it´s Monday and It´s gonna be business as usual. I made some new training exercises for my abstraction training program and started up my second 7-day program with new things to try out, as I was to curious to wait for tomorrow.... So I had exercise no 8 (week 2), telling me to pick 3-5 symbols and then draw some merged variations of them. (I chose a dog, a spaceship, a seahorse and a stapler out