Amplify Your Creative Thinking with this Open Awareness Exercise
Sometimes when I go for a walk in the morning I like to challenge myself to let everything I see and hear in without judging it. A good time for this was near the end of the fall, when the leaves were disappearing and it was tempting to get into a negative viewpoint about my surroundings.
So I call this exercise, “Open Awareness”. I do it with the help of a camera, such as the one on my phone. I just start taking pictures of anything around me that slightly catches my eye. This is different than taking pictures of everything that catches your eye because it forces you to see the beauty in the mundane. To be specific, try to take as many photos as you can! In one of the photos below, you can see that I didn’t let the power lines bother me, I used them as a key part of the photo.
And then the exercise can go in any direction later on. For example, with the photos that I’ve taken, I can go into a tool like Photoshop when I get home and start to sample some of the colours that were captured using an eyedropper tool. I can then paint a new canvas in an app like Procreate with some of those colour swatches derived from the photograph.
Another example of when this is useful would be if you’re out for a walk in the middle of the day and you’re annoyed by all the noise that you’re hearing. Can you be curious about listening to those sounds with a bit of curiosity? Can you record them and manipulate those recordings later on into a new work of art, such as an ambient piece?
The benefits of this exercise can transfer over to any creative practice. This lets us see how quickly we turn to judging our surroundings or our own personal efforts, in search of some sort of outcome that has been constructed in the mind.
