Activity to Jumpstart Your Creative Brain
Have you ever done a Color Walk? It’s a fun activity that can help jumpstart your creative brain. It’s an exercise to try when you’re in a creative slump like writers block, boredom, or trying to decide what to paint, cook, code, or design. The idea behind the Color Walk is to step away from your project, change your setting, and turn up your senses. It’s like a warm-up exercise for creative thinking. A Color Walk can spark ideas because it gets you “out of your head” and out into the world. Plus, walking reduces stress, cheers you up, and can help reduce your response to stress. So, let’s get going!
What you need for a Color Walk:
Notebook and pen
Smartphone or Camera
90 minutes
Take Photos
Go for an hour long walk by yourself—without the kids, without the dog—just you and your camera. Before you leave, select a color and only take photos of things that are that color. For my example I choose yellow. Take at least 18 photos.
* Note about Location: Walking in the forest isn’t the best place for this exercise if your color is taxi yellow. I’ve had the best results from the Color Walk by strolling through my city neighborhood. Basically, you want to go somewhere with diversity and a lot to see. A park, public garden, beach, or Main street would all work great!
Curate
When you get home, scroll through your photos and select 9 images to keep and delete the rest. But don’t just select the ones you like; every artist needs a point of view. Your criteria might be simple like: “only keep organic images” or “only keep manmade images”. You might decide to keep the 9 darkest shades of blue and delete all the light ones. Or you might unearth a more meaningful criteria and discover that you have something to say about the environment or politics or society. Don’t overthink this and get yourself stuck on the desire for deeper meaning. That defeats the purpose of the exercise!
Take a screen shot of your 9 images (like I did in the header image of this article). Or print them out, grab some scissors and a glue stick and make a collage (extra points if you do that!).
Reflect
Write about your walk and your collection of 9 images in your notebook. Here are some questions to get you started:
What did you see that was obvious or cliche? (For example, a red fire truck or orange orange). What colors revealed themselves more slowly?
What were you surprised to see?
If you walked in a familiar place, like your neighborhood or campus, what did you notice that you never saw before?
Did you find yourself trying to spot a specific object (maybe you really wanted to find a purple house or an orange car?)
Takeaways
At the very least, I hope you had fun on your Color Walk. Maybe you even felt a small sense of adventure. When I was doing mine, I remembered how excited I got about scavenger hunts and easter egg hunts as a kid. As I walked, I was curious about the yellow things I’d discover around each corner. Once, I glimpsed what I thought was spray paint on a wooden fence. When I got closer I realized the yellow streaks were bright fungi that were growing between the cracks of the damp boards; such a cool texture! Days later, I was struggling with a brochure design and it dawned on me that it would work much better if I added a woodgrain texture to the cover — inspired by my photo of the fence.
A Color Walk can also be meditative and grounding because we tend to slow down when we’re hunting and looking with purpose. And if you’re really lucky, the activity might even bring clarity to your original project (the one you were uninspired by).
