One of my favourite ways to get creative!

One of my favourite creative thinking warm up exercises is the Climbing in Through a Small Window, or as I call it, Closed Box/Open Box. This activity comes from Nick Bantock, author of Griffin and Sabine as well as The Trickster's Hat - A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity. Perigree Press, New York. 2014.

You'll need a timer, a pen, some paper. And, you need to be ready to draw teeny tiny shapes in two teeny tiny boxes.  Bantock suggests drawing two 2" x 2" boxes. Box one is closed, box two has an open side - or a large opening.
That puts us at about this size:

Clearly, it doesn't have to be exact (but most creativity exercises work best with limits or restraints), but it is important that you do this on paper and not on an ipad or computer - you want to have and  feel the connection between your hand, pen or pencil and the resistance of the paper.

Then, set the timer for five minutes. Draw as many animals as you can in the box.  

Timer goes? Stop.

Then, set it again for five more minutes and draw as many animals as you can leaving the box. He uses the term "escaping" but I find that a bit anxiety inducing - I mean what if you can't draw the same animals from box one leaving box two? Escape makes it sound dire. I prefer leaving, exiting, moving from an enclosed area to an open space.

I always enjoy this exercise and am almost always surprised at how challenging it is to try and craft recognizable animal shapes, and to put little faces and expressions on them, and to make sure the same number get out as were in. I'm not sure how successful I was in the latter - it seems as if I have more animals getting out in Box B than I did in Box A!  

In my view, the idea of this exercise is to free us from the "I can't" frame of mind - the  "I can't draw, I'm hopeless, I'm not creative" -  to doing the required work anyway and feeling the satisfaction from having completed a creative exercise. 

Give it a go and let me know the results!