It's like that book...

Remember that book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" Each character sees a different character 'looking at me'.

What do you see? When you look at a picture or a set of pictures you want to scrap, what do you see? Is it a feeling? A color? A smile?

Something I read in Ali Edwards blog this morning got my attention. She said, "So much of creativity is about how you see things."

She also talked about how we often just pass by things, never giving it a second glance. I looked it as how I pass up creative inspiration because I don't really look or give things a second glance. In other words, I'm not stopping to smell the roses. Or I find myself thinking that a creation absolutely needs to look one way when if I would just stop and look, I would see that it's actually supposed to look different.

Let me give you an example. I've been scrapbooking some of our Alaskan vacation pictures from last year. When I look at those pictures, I see the vibrance and light in the pictures. I want to capture that. I want the pictures to be the main focus. I don't feel that way about pictures of my cats, of normal day activities, and so on. And sometimes I'll try to cram the vacation pictures into a page I would normally create for a picture of my cats, us, etc. And it doesn't work! When I do that I'm not creating as I see it. Sometimes I'll be inspired by someone's work, but when I try to imitate that, it doesn't work. It's like taking someone elses creativity and trying to shove it through tunnels of my own creativity. And things get stuck! Ha! As soon as I notice that I pretty much stop what I'm doing and I'll either save or delete my work (if I'm working in Photoshop).

I also notice that I work totally differently when I'm doing digital and traditional. With digital I feel more flexible. I can work on something and if I don't like it I just hit the delete key. But with traditional I can't hit delete. Instead I just look at a pile of things I just wasted. I've learned my lesson in that area and now I absolutely know that I have to have something that I 'see' before I plunge into a traditional page project. Like last week's page with the sewn butterflies...that was something I saw. I had been inspired by something earlier that week. I realize that I cannot just make it happen with traditional. I suppose it's that way with digital too, but I feel like I have more freedom with digital.

What do you see? What inspires you? Are you passing creativity by? Maybe you are too focused on your page looking like the next person's page. Maybe you are being too hard on yourself. Maybe you think you should have more time to create, so you become discouraged and don't do anything with the time you do have. Maybe you just need to sit back and enjoy those moments with your children, your spouse, your pet, instead of scrapping them right now--those moments are so inspirational! (you could just journal about those moments instead of scrapping them right now) What's important to you? Do you feel like you are scrapbooking just to scrapbook?