1. Your Creative Self-Portrait (any medium) & Story
Your Creative Self-Portrait (any medium) & Story
Assignment

2. Brainstorm: What can you compare your creativity to?
If your creativity were an animal, what would it be?
What about an object?
What colors do you associate with yourself?
What locations do you associate with yourself?
What other metaphoric images come to mind when you think of your creative self?
What strengths and/or challenges would you like to depict?
People sometimes say it’s hard to think metaphorically, but cliches are usually metaphors: freedom represented by butterflies, peace represented by a sunset, beauty represented with flowers. These will all come out in brainstorms, and all you need to do is push beyond the cliches to think of your own images.

3. Think metaphorically.
Portrait by Pierre Beteille

4. Bethany Helzer
Bethany Helzer

5. Get preposterous.

6. Or colorful.
Cristina Otero is a 16-year-old portrait artist.

7. Or weird.

8. Get in touch with the wild child within.
Some interesting creative techniques:
Exaggeration
Unusual combinations of imagery.
Cut up pieces of an image and rearrange it.
Experiment with landscape, animals, food, objects
Experiment with perspective, camera angles, etc.
Omit yourself entirely

9. “Appropriation”
You may “appropriate” images from the Internet for this exercise
But the overall image must be at least 70% original
The concept must be your original work (rather than already being realized in images you appropriate).
If you appropriate work, keep a list for yourself of the authors of the work you’re using, for your own reference.

10. When/How/How Far to Google (how Googling affects your creative process)
Be careful about when, where, and how far you look for outside inspiration. Google images can be inspirational—or they can “steal your fire.” Figure out what’s best for you—the idea is to bring your unique vision to what you’re doing.
When to Google can be important. Get your own ideas out first before launching a Google search of images related to your topic—unless your totally lost and need a little fire to get going.
How far should you Google? You can start to feel overwhelmed if you go too deep, but if you go shallow and see lame images, that can be less than inspiring as well.
How to Google can be important—using strong key words is important. “Portrait” will probably yield some yawns. Even “creative self-portrait” will probably not be terribly creative (see image here). However, Googling obliquely can spark lateral thinking. For example, “mixed media” resulted in more creative self portraits than “mixed media self-portraits” did.
Pay attention to how Googling affects your creative process.

11. Next Steps
Brainstorm LOTS of ideas (about 50 is average for creative work)
These may include ideas related to one another— let them flow.
Make rough sketches. Then, move to drafts.
Use any medium.
If you use a digital camera, take LOTS of pics before you pick one.
Think of how you will explain your portrait and tell us a brief story of your creative life.

12. QUESTIONS