15*15 CREATIVITY EXERCISE SERIES — 8

Create 15 artwork pieces that feature a rose

This is your opportunity to go on adventures of artistic imagination

In this series (15*15), I design and present you 15 adventures and challenges in 15 days. I am developing these challenges in real-time — I hope you do enjoy and benefit from these exercises. The goal of these challenges is to help you expand your imagination and exercise your muscles of creativity. This is the 8th day and 8th installment of that series. Our anchor point for this exercise is a rose.

You will work with diverse media and create 15 different pieces of artwork featuring roses.

This artwork can be a sketch, a painting, a crafted piece, a poem, a song, a theatrical play, a movie, a dance, a performance, a story, a doodle, a book cover, a poster, a sculpture etc.

A multidisciplinary and multimedia tour of rose-inspired art

If you want to get further inspiration and suggestions, check out the following guides and videos — they all feature roses:

For example, you can learn and practice how to draw a rose:

You can also paint a rose. You can see an artist creating a rose in real-time here:

You can draw doodles or sketches featuring roses. Here is an example tutorial demonstrating how to draw art deco roses:

You can use clay to create a 3D rose sculpture. New York’s Museum of Modern Arts has a famous rose sculpture in its garden, for example:

You might compose a song featuring roses. Here are some songs on roses, to provide you some inspiration:

You can think of creating book covers or titles that include a rose. As it turns out, there are many romance novels that have a ‘rose’ in their titles:

You can also create a story featuring a rose. Here is a great Medium piece on the story of a rose:

You can also write a poem inspired by roses. Here are some poems featuring roses:

You can create ideas for all different media. Your purpose is not to develop the end product or artwork. Just consider possibilities and create 15 ideas. For example, here is a musical titled ‘Rose’:

Let’s say you want to learn to draw a rose with your pencil. Here is how to do it:

You can also consider doing some craftwork and create some roses with your artistic skills.

Here is how to create a rose using aluminum foil:

Here is how to create a rose using a ribbon:

And finally, here is how to create a rose using paper:

Here is a still life famous painting titled ‘Roses’

There are hundreds of more examples and pictures if you are interested:

Your Challenge: Create 15 artwork pieces that feature a rose

For this challenge, you will need to create 15 artwork pieces featuring a rose.

Try to imagine and create a diversity of creative outputs— film, craftwork, drawings, paintings, multimedia, story, poem, haiku, sketch work, comic, cartoon, stand-up comedy etc.

For the purposes of this exercise, please do not delve into too much detail though. Aim for 3–4 minutes of quick creative work. You do not need to make your creations perfect. Try to write down or apply the minimum number of viable ideas for each mini-project. If you want to delve in and go deeper, leave it for later. On the other hand, if you do not have the time or the will to complete all 15, you can choose several for now, and leave the rest for later.

Remember: You are doing this just to have fun. This is meant to be for fun. Just play and mess around. Improvise. Try to surprise yourself and your brain.

You will benefit a lot from exercising your creative muscles and getting out of your comfort zone. If you do the exercise above, you will strengthen your creative muscles 15 times. We need to give our brain creative challenges every day. If we make this a habit, the process will help us rewire our brains to be more open to creativity. It is important to start small and treat these exercises as play. They are small experiments in imagination. They work much better if you stop judging your ideas and obsessing over feasibility, quality, or depth. Every creative or entrepreneurial act starts with taking a leap of faith into the unknown. Each time you jump into the unknown, this makes you more adventurous, open, and creative.

See you in the 9th episode of this journey tomorrow.

I hope we can all be artists who keep creating, improvising, and playing.

Fahri

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.