Mike's Creativity Blog

Currently, I am taking a major risk: I decided to join the CU volleyball club. I have only played volleyball for 8 weeks, and in sand for that matter. I ended up trying out for the team and making A team. This surprised me, as I didn't expect to make such a good impression in tryouts. Being fairly new to volleyball, I am still very unpolished and don't know half of the skills/knowledge to play. This scares me a lot because I feel very inadequate, and there's a looming cloud over me saying I will disappoint the team through my inexperience.  This is a major risk for me because I can have bad social anxiety at times, and I am continuously followed by a fear of failure and rejection. I have been doing a lot of work for my mental health in the past couple years, however, and I thought that this could be a great opportunity for multiple reasons: I love the sport, new community, improving my skills, overcoming fear, and more.  Now, I still am very worried about my current situati

While creativity is all around me, and I have many, many artistic thoughts during my regular life,  the typical roadblocks to my creativity comes from my mental health, or my attempt to create. If I am having difficulty in relationships, or am stressed out in some other way, I find it very hard to maintain a creative flame. Taking my mind off of random thoughts, whatever comes to mind, creative or not, and placing the focus on a stressful or anxious situation always hinders me. This, unfortunately, is unavoidable in life, and learning how to manage and cope with these situations will be definitive for me in my journey to creativity. As I brought up, I always run into roadblocks during my actual creation process, whether its and edit, an animation, etc. I think this happens because I have a fear of failure, rejection, not being good enough, and more. It also feels like I'm in a battle with myself to be creative when I would rather not. This feeling is difficult, because if I want to

 The first thing that comes to mind when I see this question is consuming content. I love animation. I am fascinated with its process, storytelling abilities, and the (one part of its) artform in its purest sense: drawing. Whenever I watch a show I like, read a manga, watch an illustrator on youtube, I get very inspired to open my drawing tablet and get to work. Now, I usually get stuck when I start drawing -- so that is something I need to figure out.  Here is an example of something that inspires me to get creative. This is a key frame from the tv series "Space Dandy." I have started to collect keyframe books, actually, because they are so fascinating to me. I love being able to break down an animation and discover how animators create movement on a 2d plane. Basically, when I consume content relating to things I am fascinated with, want to try, want to master, etc, my creativity is heightened from inspiration. 

 https://theindexproject.org/award/winnersandfinalists/lunark-pplc is the link the the LUNARK project. This project was created to solve the housing problem on our moon and mars. It folds into the size of a bike, and is made from solar panels. This makes it portable, and self reliant. They said that they took inspiration from origami, and I think that's fascinating! It almost looks like the original lunar landing module in a sense. They have tested it in Greenland, and continue to gather data for improvements.  As someone who is fascinated with space, I thought this project would be great to go on my blog. I think it shows a great example of divergent thinking, because this design is far from ordinary. I can't imagine the amount of effort, trial and error, and cooperation that went into this project.