18 Jul 2011

Creative Project Ideas

Here I have compiled a list of creative project ideas for rainy days. They can be done just for fun or to help you build your portfolio.





Writing

  • If you enjoy writing poetry, why not set yourself a challenge to write one poem a day for a set period of time, like one month. Afterwards you will have 30 poems or more that may need tweaking, but it's a start. After you've edited them you could sort them into different themes and produce an anthology to give as a gift to your family and friends, or you could just print one poem out to place in a greetings card on a special occasion. The same process could also work for short stories.
  • To give yourself some writing practice you could try to write the story of your own life. You could start at the beginning and work through like a chronological account or just focus on the memorable parts of your life that link together through flashbacks or flashforwards. When you're done you'll have a great record of your life to pass on to future generations and probably a better understanding of yourself.
  • If you enjoy a challenge, NaNoWriMo is right up your street. It stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place every November. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. The challenge is just for fun but it does help you to get words on paper and the friendly competition can spur you into writing. There is also lots of help, advice and great ideas on the forum.
  • Starting a blog is a great way to organise your thoughts and get yourself motivated as once you get readers you will need to keep them interested by posting regularly. You can post poetry or short stories and get feedback from other writers and even advice from agents and publishers. Then you can start to network with them and build yourself a reputation.
  • Fan fiction is great fun and a good way to hone your writing skills. The world and characters are already greated for you so you can't get bogged down in planning everything, you just need to write. Fan fiction can be based off books like Harry Potter or TV series like LOST and is really fun to write and read. Think about the parts of the book or tv series that are not shown to the reader/viewer. What happened during those missing scenes? Maybe it was something you didn't expect. If there are any loose ends that weren't tied up you can explore the possibilities of what happened next.
  • Haikus are short poems originating from Japan that follow a set structure of syllables. They have 3 lines with 5 syllables on the first line, 7 syllables on the second line and 5 syllables on the third line. Learning how to get across a message in such a short amount of words can help you be more concise in your writing.
  • Postsecret is a site where strangers annonymously send in postcards with a secret written on them. If you're over eighteen check it out, as some of the secrets are quite mysterious and leave you wondering what they're really about. Set yourself the challenge of writing a story or a poem about each of them.

Art

  • Try drawing or painting your own self portrait. Get a mirror and sit quietly on your own, taking a good long look at yourself. What does your face say about you? If you didn't know yourself, what could you tell just by looking at your features? Perhaps the laughter lines around your eyes betray your cheeky sense of humour, or the bags under them give away the many sleepless nights you've had lately. Don't try to smile or pose in a way that makes you look pretty, just relax your face and let it fall into it's natural look. Who are you really, when you're alone and nobody else is watching? How can you capture that on paper or canvas? You don't have to use true-to-life colors, you could use colors and shapes that show your personality.If you'd rather not draw yourself, why not team up with a friend and draw each other? Then compare drawings and talk about what you both tried to capture in the other person.

Graphics and Photography

  • You could create a fun series of photographs by taking a unique item (such as a teddybear) with you on your travels and taking photographs of it in each of the pictures, preferably at recognisable landmarks.
  • It's fun to create photo albums or scrapbooks on different themes to remind you of happy times, and they create wonderful gifts.
  • Try taking a series of self-portraits in which you show different emotions. Then in an image-editing program like Photoshop you could experiment with different filter effects and colors to exaggerate the emotion. For example, you could take a picture of you frowning and merge it with a photograph of a rainy day with clouds and change the hue and satuation so that it looks grey or blue.

Craft

  • If you are a fan of scented toiletaries and perfumes then why not have a go at making your own? There are plenty of tutorials on the net. You can make allsorts of beauty products including novelty soap, body lotions, lip balms, fragrances and cosmetics. Most of the ingredients are quite reasonable to buy and you have the benefit of knowing exactly what ingredients have gone into them, so you aren't paying for lots of nasty chemicals. You can also make pretty gift boxes or decorate jars and give them to your friends as gifts.
  • Team up with a friend and agree that from now on you will make each other's birthday and christmas presents instead of buying them. I've done this with my best friend for the last two or three years, and as it goes on you have to get more and more creative so you don't do the same thing twice. I've made her some cupcake shaped soaps, designed her a pop-art portrait of herself on Photoshop, burned her a CD of songs about friendship and made her a big carboard mural that I decorated with photos and scraps of our memories together. In return I have recieved loads of great things from her including a toy horse that she sewed out of felt, a pair of canvas trainers that she spray-painted a funky design on, a drink that she mixed especially for me in a decorated bottle and a homemade birthday cake in the shape of a hippie van. Why not do the same with your best mate and see how long you can keep the tradition going before you run out of ideas?

2 comments :

  1. Umm... you let a bit of the guild seep into your NaNoWriMo point. Just thought I would point it out as it probably won't make any sense to anyone else. XD

    ReplyDelete

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