Category: creative process

art, creative, creative process, creativity, theatre, writer, writing

Inspired: Shakespeare Didn’t Write for a Living

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest
From Pinterest

“This above all: To thine own self be true.” ~ Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Maybe your creative projects have taken a backseat to other parts of your life. Maybe you aren’t making the progress you want to make in the time you’d like to make it. Don’t beat yourself. And please don’t give up. People whom you will never meet and never know could gain so much benefit from your creativity. If you love the work, then keep at it. Bit by glorious bit. Here’s why:

When I say Shakespeare, what do you say? Theater. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. Playwright. Old Globe. All of these are probable, wonderful answers. Shakespeare made a life in the theater and he made a living in real estate. He wrote plays because he loved to write them. I was shocked to recently learn this and I want to share it with you for a very specific reason: your career does not have to define your legacy. What you do to make money and pay the bills doesn’t need to consume you. You can choose, independent of your paycheck, how the world will remember you. Your title does not determine your passion, nor does it dictate where you place your heart, loyalty, and energy. Those are choices, and only you can make them.

Shakespeare could have easily thrown himself into his real estate work and abandoned his writing altogether. He could have relegated himself to be a laborer who didn’t have time for creative pursuits. And we would all be worse off for that choice. It took a long time for him to stabilize his finances so that he could spend the majority of his time writing in his later years. Creative pursuits are like that – we do as much as we can when we can out of our sheer desire to make something that matters. If that sounds like you, don’t despair. You’re in good company; the Bard felt your pain. He kept going. So should you.

creative, creative process, creativity, fear, product development, work

Beautiful: A Lesson from American Express and The Ellen Show – You Have to Rise Above Fear

Christa Avampato
The Ellen Amex photo gift card
The Ellen Amex photo gift card

When I joined American Express in the summer of 2008, my first project was to develop a photo gift card that would give customers the opportunity to put a personal photo on a gift card. On Thursday, that product was featured on The Ellen Show with the original template design I worked on. My VP at the time said I had a $200K budget and 7 weeks to launch the product from start to finish or I’d be out of a job. He also said he and my director had no time to help me. This happened the same day Lehman Brothers failed, the bottom fell out of the economy, and the company embarked on its first major round of layoffs as the stock price fell to a record low of $9 / share. Panic was everywhere, and for good reason. I put my fear aside and got to work because I needed that job. The project launched on time and under budget, and the product is still going strong today despite intense criticism from many of my then co-workers.

Some day I’ll write about everything I learned during those dark days of our economy. Here’s the biggest lesson: in every circumstance, we have to rise above fear and criticism to do our best work. We have to look way out onto the fringes and trust our creative gut to pull the trigger, even and especially during difficult times. In the short run, this is a tough path though eventually history rewards us with the knowledge that our intuition is one of our most powerful and valuable possessions. It will always guide us in the right direction if we allow it to have its say.

change, creative, creative process, creativity

Beautiful: Alice and the Mad Hatter Believe the Best People are Entirely Bonkers. I Agree!

Christa Avampato

photo Alice in Wonderland is my favorite children’s book. When I did summer stock theater in Vermont before my senior year at Penn, I fulfilled one of my dreams and played Alice in an adaptation of the story. The tale of Alice resonates with me because she and I believe in madness, impossible things, and the reality of imagination.

We’ve got to be a little bonkers to dream up something and believe we can breathe life into it through sheer will. But that’s exactly how it happens. It’s exactly this kind of madness that built New York and every other city. It’s this kind of madness that invents, explores, inspires, and creates. This is the madness that sees the present state of the world as just the beginning, rolls up its sleeves, and starts to change it. Madness makes the world go ’round.

creative process, creativity, product, product development, yoga

Beautiful: My First T-Shirt Designs Inspired by The Wizard of Oz and Jerry Maguire Will Go on Sale September 9th

Christa Avampato
What will my first t-shirt design be? Find out at http://www.facebook.com/onefineyogi

And now for a mad idea: my first two inspired t-shirt designs, inspired by The Wizard of Oz and Jerry Maguire, will go on sale on Monday, September 9th. (To get an email when the sale starts, add your contact info by clicking here). The sale will last for 3 weeks and then the orders will be filled if I sell a minimum of 20 of each design at $18 each. Profits will be donated to Compass Yoga and will be tax-deductible for you. If I don’t sell 20 shirts, you won’t be charged and I’ll go back to the drawing board to create some different designs. Think of it as Kickstarter for t-shirts – what gets funded, gets built. There will be 5 different t-shirt styles of each design to choose from – different cuts, colors, and types of fabric.

These are the first products for sale through One Fine Yogi, a new brand I’m building of yoga-inspired products. Being both a product developer and a yoga and meditation teacher, I wanted to combine those two passions to create yoga-inspired products that are good for you, good for the planet, and inspire others around you. Stay tuned for more details as we approach September 9th. In the meantime, join the One Fine Yogi Facebook page and get a sneak peek at one of the designs.

art, business, creative, creative process, creativity, music, technology, time, writer, writing

Beautiful: What We Can Learn About Time from Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, Black Sabbath, and Angry Birds

Christa Avampato

robin_thicke_blurred_lines_album_cover_ARIA_120613_640x360Singer Robin Thicke has something to celebrate. After 10 years in the business, the 36-year old has his first #1 album with Blurred Lines. His first album never got out of the triple digits. Think Thicke has grit to stick with it for all these years? The band Black Sabbath recorded music for 46 years before their album, 13, hit #1 in June. The crackerjack team over at Rovio Entertainment created the wildly popular app, Angry Birds, after creating 51 other apps.

Age has nothing to do with it
Hollywood, Broadway, Silicon Valley, and American Idol have created a culture obsessed with youth. The wild rise of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech moguls in their 20s has caused a dangerous and unfortunate fixation on youth among the venture and investor community. Many VCs and investors refuse to even hear the startup pitches of any founders older than 30. We bemoan getting older and so we nip, tuck, pluck, lie about our age, and workout to the point of breaking our bodies, never happy with how we look or where we are along life’s path. Robin Thicke is 36. Ozzy Osbourne is 64. Peter Vesterbacka, one of the Angry Birds creators, is 44. If you think you have to be at the top of your field before you see your first wrinkle or gray hair, think again.

Success takes time and talent
When we aren’t as successful as we’d like to be at something right off the bat, we often throw in the towel. Too often and too soon, we sulk back to our homes, hide under our beds, and hope for brighter days ahead. Sometimes we resign ourselves to the idea that time has passed us by. Don’t do that. Figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and try again with this knowledge in-hand.

If your work isn’t its own reward, then find other work
Success is a personal and daily process. Even if I never receive any kind of critical acclaim as a writer, I’ll never think of the time I spend writing as a waste and I’ll never stop writing. The act of writing, putting my story out there and knowing that it helps others, is all the reward I ever need from it. Certainly critical success on a large scale would be lovely, but I don’t sit down every day and write with that as a goal. I’m trying to tell a story as honestly and as clearly as possible. If you’re working only for external rewards, you are wasting your time and setting yourself up for enormous disappointment.

If you found work you love, stick with it. If you get up every day, excited to create something, then keep creating. If your work fills your heart as it grows your portfolio, then you’re on the right track.

change, cooking, creative process, nurture

Beautiful: Nurture Transformation

Christa Avampato

10928772“We are what we nurture.” – Jonathan Dixon, Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America

We are always in a process of becoming.

I could read cooking memoirs all day, every day. There is something so human, so sensual about food and its preparation. There passion in it and it’s relatable. Everyone eats, and therefore at some point every one learns to cooking something. Ultimately cooking and eating are about transformation.

At 38, Jonathan Dixon left behind his work as a writer to enroll at the CIA to become a cook. He gave up all his earthly possessions, moved from Brooklyn to Hyde Park, NY (across the Hudson River from my own hometown), and threw himself into his new vocation. He wasn’t a cook when he started, but he made it his goal to become one. And so he did.

We can do the same. We can reinvent who we are. We can grow our current skill sets and create new ones. We can take up new hobbies, interests, projects, and careers. We can make a new home in a new city. Newness is never beyond us.

art, books, creative, creative process, creativity, design

Beautiful: Blender Master Class from No Starch Press

Christa Avampato

blender_simonds_complete_V7.inddDesign skills are quickly becoming a part of the necessary knowledge base of professionals in a wide variety of fields. Plenty of courses, online and off, free and fee-based, are cropping up to demystify the process of design. Open source design software is also paving the way to help us evolve from media consumers into media creators.

If 3D design is on your wish list of skills, you’re in luck. Blender is an incredibly popular open source 3D design suite with a massive user community. No Starch Press has just published the book Blender Master Class by author and professional 3D artist Ben Simonds. The book guides you step-by-step through 3 intricate projects by teaching you modeling, sculpting, materials, and rendering skills. The book also explains how Blender interfaces with GIMP, an open source graphic design program, and includes a DVD with all of the relevant files for the projects described in the book.

Simonds makes Blender, a sophisticated program, approachable by breaking down its basic features one by one. Blender is used by many artists for animation, simulation, and game design. However, these features are not covered in this book. Simonds focused his efforts on the niche that needed to be filled – helping new Blender users understand the basics of creating still images.

With this book you can quickly get started on the task of getting those 3D designs out of your imagination and into the world. While Blender can feel overwhelming at first because of all of its bells and whistles, you’ll have Simonds with you on every step of the journey as a guide and supporter. I can’t wait to see what you create!

creative, creative process, creativity, story, writing

Beautiful: Storytelling the Pixar Way

Christa Avampato

I am a huge fan of Pixar’s storytelling and their 2 word business plan – “quality rules.” I found this illustration of their storytelling rules and had to share it with all of you. My favorite is #4 because it so elegantly and simply gives us a way forward in telling and understanding the framework of any story. I hope you find this list as helpful as I do!

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creative, creative process, creativity, play, theatre, time, writing

Beautiful: There Is No Time Like the Present

Christa Avampato

0b458c7c03370c2046f32e8f87edfa96Yesterday I took a playwriting class. I started my career in theatre management so it’s a genre that I worked in and around for many years. I’d like to get back to it, but in a different way this time. I’m not sure if that means as a writer so I thought I would take this opportunity to explore the option. Also, I have a story I’d like to tell and as much as I tried to put it into narrative form, it’s meant to be seen as well as heard.

There were a lot of nuggets of knowledge in the class. I learned about dramatic structure, character development, story arc, and the role of timing. It gave me enough to get started. And that was perhaps the most valuable piece of insight.

Our instructor urged us to get going and finish as soon as possible. Dump a first draft out on the page in a month, 2 months tops. Don’t worry if it’s messy, disjointed, and rough around all of its edges. Just…get…it….out before it looses steam, before you get too scared to have the story you need to tell stare back at you. This is a time to be hasty, as hasty as humanly possible.

What’s true for playwriting is also true for so many projects in life. I firmly believe that we hold ourselves back far too often. We become so intentional, so purposeful that we lose sight of the joy found in spontaneity. We worry too much about failure, and when we’re done with that we worry too much about success. We have all kinds of reasons for not doing something we really want to do – most of them are rubbish.

There will be time to refine, time to tweak and fix and finesse. But that time is not at the start of trying something new, it’s not at the beginning of the beginning. As hard as it may be, put your perfectionism aside. Calm your mind by reminding yourself that no one has to see your first draft of anything. You don’t even need to tell anyone you’re creating a first at all. Just begin. Start. Try. Play. Make a mess. Now. There is no time like the present.

art, beauty, books, creative, creative process, creativity, illustration, photographs, pictures, technology

Beautiful: Creating Photos and Art with The Book of GIMP

Christa Avampato

bookofgimpIt’s more than a book; it’s a tome. Through No Starch Press, Olivier Lecarme and Karine Delvare just published The Book of GIMP, a complete and comprehensive guide on GIMP, a free open-source software program that successfully rivals pricey options like Adobe Photoshop. Visual design software can be intimidating because it has so many bells and whistles, as well as its own vocabulary that is foreign to people just getting started in design. Lecarme and Delvare demystify GIMP without dumbing it down in any way.

The book begins with a 24-page quick start guide that orients new users to GIMP. If you’re already familiar with the software and need help with specific functionality, skip to any one of the well-organized chapters to get in-depth knowledge on photo retouching, drawing and illustration, logo creation, composite photography, animation, and web design.

This book takes you through each area progressing from basics to advanced functionality, providing descriptive screenshots and step-by-step guidance. The mini-lessons and exercises in each chapter build upon one another so they are ideal for someone who just wants to complete a quick task or for someone who wants to know all of the ins and outs of GIMP’s many capabilities.

The reference section and appendices go into deep detail on settings and tools that are available to hone your masterpieces. It even has a chapter on the physiology of vision! And if that’s not enough for you, there’s always the section of additional readings, tutorials, related projects, and connections to the global GIMP user community.

Whether you’re just getting started in visual design or are a seasoned expert, The Book of GIMP is the best creative companion for all of your efforts to Make Something Beautiful.