Taking Inspiration

After several of us attended Synergy and told our guildmates about Dan Cormier's Telephone Project and Christine DuMont's critique process, we embarked on our own version of an inspiration project to help us stretch our creativity muscles and continue developing our own design voices.

One of our members, Deanna Miller, is a photographer who has loads of creative Instagram photos. I asked if she would let us use some of her images as jumping off points and she kindly agreed. I chose about 15 photos and put each one in an envelope and each participant blindly chose one. Everyone was told not to show any other participant what they had.

We went home with instructions to make whatever we wanted using the photo for design inspiration. At the next meeting we would put all the items on one side of the table and the images face down on the other.

At the reveal session today, we flipped all the pictures over and as a group tried to match up the items with their associated photo. In most cases we were correct but a few tripped us up. We went around the table so each person could tell a little about their experience.

It was educational to see what everyone took from their inspiration. We had such a good time, in fact, that we decided to do it again. This time we're using a concept for our theme: Negative Space. Put your brainstorm caps on...the next reveal will be at our August meeting.

Judy Slater

Barb Kaczor

Denice Girardeaux

Selma Andrews

Irene Hill

Mavis Strakal

Rebecca Watkins

Denise Graham

Deanna Miller