Five Activities to Curveball Your Creative Strengths

Whether you’re handy with a brush, have an eye for photography or if the needle is your weapon of choice dipping your creativity into something you’d normally never attempt can produce tons of benefits. These days creative people tend to be multitalented due to their endlessly curious minds and employers are particularly looking for candidates who can cover a range of roles. Learning new skills and curveballing what you already rock at will increase not only your employability and make you indispensible in the workplace but will also benefit in terms of your own personal self development.

Buy a film camera
It doesn’t have to be an expensive SLR, you can’t grab yourself a cheap disposable one for a fraction of the price. In some creative industries being efficient and adaptable are key traits however sometimes it's worth slowing down. Try taking a camera around with you the next time you go to the countryside, or away for the weekend, or even on your way to work. Take your time with the shots you take, get a feel for the composition and lighting. Composition is important in most aspects of creative work from designing a magazine cover to creating a restaurant menu. Where the eye is drawn to allows you to manipulate your audience to look at the most important parts of a piece of work and, especially in advertising, be that call to attention. Film cameras stop you from being a perfectionist. When a million things around you are happening at once you can’t take your time mulling over the shots you take. You also can’t look back at your shots and criticise your work until the reel is done.

Take Humans of New York for example. Starting off as a photography project shooting images of New York’s vibrant range of inhabitants they decided to interview the people that they met and now it has expanded into one of the most widely known projects of the decade with over two million social media followers. You could try the 365 Day Project which is a way of documenting your life. The project, while popular on social media platforms, especially Instagram, requires you to take a photo every day of the year with a certain prompt each day. You could use this as an incentive to take photos and expand your creativity. Try the intense mode by not developing the images until the end of the year.

Take a human form drawing class

The first main positive of taking a drawing class is that you’ll instantly learn about human anatomy. Understanding how the human body moves and works is a skill useful to illustrators, photographers and performers. Sketching as a general skill can help fiction writers envision their creations. The second positive is that in that kind of environment you’ll meet plenty of other creatives, from novices to more professional artists. 

Most cities have classes you can attend for a minimal fee, plenty with the option of alcohol alongside if you want to make a night of it. If you can’t find yourself an organised class grab a sketchpad and your weapon of choice and head out to a bench, café window or park and start drawing the people around you, observing how they move, their facial expressions and the sheer amount of diversity around you.

Free write

Sit down with no idea of what you’re going to write and blast out some pages. There’s endless research backing up the rewards of writing before you go to sleep. It’s a way of getting everything down on paper so that you can have a blissful slumber without your mind flying off the handle. From a creative standpoint what you write could be anything, absolutely anything, there are no rules. It could be an essay, journal entry, bit of fiction, rant, letter, anything. For experienced writers you’ll be able to get a chunk of that novel idea you’ve been obsessing over while neglecting your freelance work over and done with giving you at least a week of clear-minded concentration, uninterrupted by the thoughts of dystopian futures and space wars. For the average Joe who last put pen to paper when writing their phone number on a night out the exercise will immediately open you up to writing more eloquently, a useful tool for literally everybody.

Write or Die is an incredibly useful tool to pressure you into getting down those words. Although originally it was built much cleaner, the website gives you a space where you can write with the looming knowledge that if you stop you’ll be punished if you so much as hesitate. Usually by what you’ve written being instantly deleted with no means of resurrection depending of course on the setting you choose. This is the best way for you to get down whatever is flying around in your head at the time with forethought very much an impossibility. Write, a Windows Store app, and WriteRoom, available from Apple’s App Store, are both very similar programs. They both offer you a window void of any distractions, graphics or formatting and allow you to only do one thing: write. While these methods are suiting to some a notebook and pen will suffice just as much are a more permanent means of either transcribing your thoughts or creating something wonderful.

Cook for yourself

This particular activity might not seem creative to some, and possibly a downright chore to most but experimenting with food is one of the more elusive creative outlets in our lives. Do you remember trying to make food as a child? Did you ever make a horrific mess while attempting brownies without the recipe or maybe you just threw random ingredients together to see what happened when it went in the oven? As well as the massive benefit of helping you with your health and learning a new skill cooking can teach you a lot about yourself. If you’re the type to prefer to make up the ingredient levels and mix things up a little you’re probably also the type of person to skip the tutorials in video games or go for that questionable cocktail at the bar. Whereas if you’re a meticulous planner your ingredients will be laid out perfectly, everything measured to perfection and utensils laid out in chronological order. You probably also have a bulging Filofax, colour coded calendar and have a chronic habit of being on time.

Make your own website

No, using Blogger doesn’t count, not even Wordpress. Coding is an incredibly useful skill that, as well giving you the potential of a well paid side hustle, also goes far into giving you more understanding of creating a successful online space. Nowadays most businesses have online platforms; hotels, freelance writers, clothing brands and even your favourite health food store. Not having a digital presence often spells disaster for companies and creating a interactive, fluid website that attracts and keeps customers is a sought after skill. Not only are you putting your academic mind and problem solving skills to use designing a website requires a good understanding of the human eye and behaviour. What can you do to keep someone on the page for longer? How are you going to make your website more responsive? 

There are plenty of coding courses online. Free ones from the likes of Lynda.com offering video tutorials and Google's Digital Garage courses to Shaw Academy that has online tutorials by real professors. Your local university is likely to offer short to long courses on the topic for a steeper fee but well worth it in the long run.

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