Forget What You Think You Know

At college I studied fine art.

It was quite a traditional course, and they still had a drawing class.

They would ask us to draw all sorts of things you might expect - fruit and vegetables, household objects, fabric, glass, all to encourage us to broaden our drawing skills with different textures and surfaces.

We all became very adept at reproducing all of these things.

One day a new teacher arrived.

She asked us to do a very simple thing.

She asked us to draw a cup.

So we all drew our cups, neatly and obediently.

When we were finished she asked us to draw the cup again.

But this time we were to turn the cups upside down.












Suddenly it was very difficult.

The handle didn’t curve they way we were used to.

The top was not hollow. there was no rim to draw.

There was nothing familiar about this object.

It was just an object.

Our brains had to completely reset itself to make sense of the structure.

Everyone struggled with the drawing and took twice as long to draw the cup.

The problem was, we’d all been drawing with our memory, rather than our eyes.

We’d been drawing what we remembered was familiar about a cup.

Not what our eyes told us about that particular object.

After using this technique several times, we all became better artists.

We’d taught ourselves to forget what we remember and trust our eyes.

This lesson can be taken with all creative processes.

Quite often we subconsciously fall back on comfortable creative rhythms and processes familiar to us, it’s easier and we don’t have to use any energy challenging ourselves.

Try moving yourself out of this comfort zone.

When designing that menu, try doing it freehand using a fountain pen or a piece of charcoal or an old 1980s Letraset.

If you’re producing photographs, forget those instagram filters and try finding an interesting way of making it beautiful or memorable before it gets to the camera.

If you’re making an email newsletter, try ditching that template and making something look so different and arresting you would have to share it with all your closest friends.

Turn off or hide every piece of equipment you normally use and try doing the job with what ever you have lying around.

Forget what you think you know.

Or turn it upside down.