Creativity

“Art is what we call...the thing an artist does.

It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the ...eye of the... See more

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

I like to say that a single panel cartoon is like a mini stage. The artist is a set designer, choreographer, script writer, costume designer, casting director. Each element in the drawing needs to be necessary for the idea, no more, no less; there are exceptions of course.

Forget the myth of the 'Eureka!' moment, and allow me to suggest another way: the bucket theory of creativity.

Buckets are little homes for the things you want to explore deeper.

Maybe you’ll write or draw or build about them one day, but that’s not really the point.

All you gotta do is make some buckets.

Because making buckets creates a magnetic fo... See more

Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” What you pour out is a culmination of everything you’ve filled up on previous to that point.