Happiness Project Day 67: Slaying Creative Monsters

Creative Monster

My latest Artist's Way class is only in it's second week, and I'm really enjoying it. It's a good strong group and everyone is already gelling. Great to watch happen, even better to be a part of it. I feel really blessed to be able to facilitate and hold space for creative healing. 

Today we did exquisite corpse drawings of our creative monsters. You can read more about exquisite corpse here, if you like. It's a fun exercise that I've adapted for my Artist's Way class.

Here's how it works: Each person folds a piece of paper into three sections and draws a monster head in the top section. Then she or he folds it over to conceal the drawing, and trades with someone else, who then draws a torso and arms, and again folds the paper to conceal the drawing and trades with someone else to draw the bottom third of the creature.

What we end up with is (often) a hilarious mish-mash monster - although the one pictured above looks surprisingly cohesive.

By the way, a creative monster is anyone in your life who has squelched your creative growth; often a teacher, parent or spouse. They may ridicule you for being artistic, or laugh at your art, or they may not even believe that you did it because it was too good. Most everybody has creative monsters, and they are often the reason that people stop creating at a young age.

By making these silly exquisite corpse drawings, we're attempting to exorcise our monsters, and see them for what they are: ridiculous little creatures who don't know jack about art. 

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the other ones we did today, but here are some from a class from last year:

We collected the 3 sections of drawings that one person did, and put them together to see if there was any similarity. Not too much in this one but....

...this person ended up drawing a whole person (a sketch of her actual creative monster, I believe), on the three different drawings. And interestingly, the all line up together. For the record, he's saying "Blah blah blah, bs" and wearing a name tag that reads "Hi! My name is Jackass." I love it!