Throughout my time at the University of Maine, I notice a trend in many of the creative classes that I took. From New Media, to Fine Art, to English, the creative process was always the same and described as a step-by-step guide that worked for everyone.
I believe that the creative process is individual. Anyone who creates has their own process that gets them to the end result. As an artist or a creator, whatever it is that you're creating, your success is dependant on how well you understand your own creative process.
Over the course of this project, I learned a lot about my own creative process. Most importantly, I realized the causes of my art block, and began to develop techniques to overcome it. I started with the goal of creating 3 pieces a week, but as you can probably guess by the homepage of this website, I was not successful at this. There were many days that I didn't produce anything.
For me, it wasn't until I let go of the accepted models of the creative process and began exploring how I worked personally, that I began to see the real potential in my artistic ability
For me, and maybe this is true for many people, my art begins with a very clear vision in my mind. At least this is how the things I am truly excited to create begin. This vision can seem like a blueprint for what the final piece should be, and for most of my life I thought that was what it was. The end result must look like that vision or else it's not done. While there are cases where this led to success for me, those are the exeption compared to the number of past failures and abandoned projects. Over the course of this project, I came to realize that I was treating the starting vision as a rubric that decided whether my art passed or failed. If it didn't match the vision, or if I started a piece and couldn't figure out how to achieve the vision, then it was automatically a failure. Through this project, I realized that this vision was more of an informal guide, a starting point off which the piece could grow. Treating it as a blueprint was keeping me from producing so much.