I follow Philippa Stanton on Instagram, her approach to art and creativity is fresh and quirky. My favourite images are her flat-lays – she just has a gift of creating a collection that is colourful, full of texture and interest. I often spend a few moments looking at her latest offering, wondering what it is that captivates me so. If you’re on Instagram, have a look and see what you think of her work.

Visual Collecting

On a whim I bought her book “Conscious Creativity” last weekend and have found a little time to work through some of her engaging exercises. She talks of visual collecting and documenting as:

“taking time to consciously collect and document often small observations from your daily experiences that aren’t necessarily pretty, but which interest you“

Conscious Creativity (pg55) by Philippa Stanton

Well, you know that I am already a collector of “Everyday Delights“, my own small observations from my daily round, so reading this sentence was like putting on comfortable clothes. But this next one got me thinking.

“create some sort of place to document your work, somewhere where you can chart your ideas, observations and even failures”

Conscious Creativity (pg55) by Philippa Stanton

Now, this is not something I’ve done before – I don’t really have a system that works (there’s the key) for documenting ideas, either digitally or physical. My ideas are all over the place – in Evernote, in digital albums, on Pinterest, in Instagram Collections, jotted in my morning pages – basically a ‘gemors‘ (a wonderful Afrikaans word for mess)! As she says “the act of organising your creativity is a beneficial exercise”. Hmmm. Do you have a really good way of documenting and storing your creative ideas? How do you do it?

Anyway, inspired by Becky’s square theme for October, I started “collecting” ideas about lines this week. I’m still working on how to put a documentation system together that will work for me, but for now I have an digital album called “Collections – Lines”. Here are some that I’ve collected this week, and because they are also for Becky’s challenge, they are in square format.

Some are also very abstract, although I’m you’ll be able to guess what they are.

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Until next week’s installment – have a creative week! Cheers

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