Mike's Creativity Blog

 I'm going to talk about a song created by Porter Robinson for this post. There's something about him that really inspires me in regard to creativity, and I hope you all can take inspiration from him as well.  In his song "Mirror" released late 2020 (now a part of his album Nurture, Porter discusses the idea of shame and how our mental dialect is critical to not only our mental health, but pursuing our dreams and goals, our creative ideas, and everything those entail. In an interview, Porter discussed how twitter used to be a big part of his shameful mindset -- how he always started to think about himself like his biggest hater. Anything he thought of would be met with a very negative, twisted perspective that he could see someone else saying. Obviously, no one was telling these things to him, and he was damaging his creativity by existing with this mindset. In the end of his song "Mirror," we can see his revelation of this destructive thought process, and h...

 I wrote my creative individual paper on Porter Robinson, a genre impacting artist in the realm of edm and more. I am going to link a video of a podcast where he talks about his creative struggles throughout his incredible story incase anyone is interested in learning more. In 2021, he released his latest album Nurture after being in a creative draught for years. In a video by Spotify titled "Nurture Walk," Porter Robinson tells the audience to "Make your own favorite thing." He explains that if we are making things for other people, we are guessing in a way, and it's not easy to get it right. Why not make what we want to make? Why not make our own favorite thing? Won't that bring us the most joy? While this is a simple idea, I feel as though it can be lost in the chaos of the world around us. I hope this can be a reminder for you all: make what you want to make. Make your own favorite thing, enjoy the process, and love the result. Podcast link: https://www....

 I spend a lot of my time consuming YouTube content. In particular, I follow a lot of creative people in the world of animation and illustration, but also just channels that interest me (things like science, astronomy, funny content, stories, true crime). I stumbled across an interview with Jeremy Vickery hosted by Kelsey Rodriguez. Jeremy is one of the top professionals in the film industry when it comes to animation, color, and currently, augmented reality. During this interview, he mentioned the idea of breathing, and while he didn't spend minutes and minutes describing this idea, he felt that it was important enough to mention multiple times.  "Breath in, Breath out." If I recall correctly, his idea of breathing was about taking time to absorb material, and then taking time to translate into skills or something else. An example would be learning how to draw the torso in anatomy. If one constantly practices anatomy without proper reference and study habits, they may no...

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.