Finding the Muse – Andrea Quenneville

I’ve spent the past few months focusing on my family and settling into our new home and community. Now that I am ready to restart my business, I find that I’m frequently at a loss for new ideas. What inspiration I do have seems to come at awkward moments when I can’t get to my studio and once I’m finally able to sit down, I have trouble translating the ideas into tangible creations. Here are a few of the things I am trying to get myself out of this dry spell and rediscover the muse:

• Visiting galleries and artisan markets to admire the work of others
• Going for walks, hikes and bicycle rides in areas of natural beauty to look for new color combinations and intriguing shapes
• Visiting museums to learn from work outside my usual mediums
• Giving myself permission to take a break for a weekend or a week in order to consciously remove some of the stress I am creating for myself
• Challenging myself to create one thing every day for a set amount of time while being careful not to overdo it and get burned out
• Finding new sources for supplies, preferably local stores and not catalogs or online shops
• Reorganizing my existing supplies, as handling them often generates ideas
• Taking digital photos, especially macros, and then examining the patterns and textures I’ve captured
• Reading a book or watching a movie, because sometimes settings and themes used in the stories provide inspiration

I hope that some of these will prove useful to others!

Andrea blogs at Thoughts from Ms. Q