A HOWTO on wooing the muse (read the comments for additional ideas). In the end Nike nailed it: Just Fucking Do It.

I cleaned up my art cupboards this morning, something that’s always a reflective time. I found several lino plates and a whack of sketches that I forgot about, and I uncovered a mountain of unused lino.

A decade ago I bought a roll of flooring linoleum at a work auction. Flooring lino is a lot like art lino, except that the surface has a bit more texture, it’s a bit thinner, and it’s not mounted. But being the cheap bastard that I am, I saw the roll as a great opportunity, as practicing on the $20-a-sheet art-grade stuff is daunting. And in the end the floor-grade lino stands up better and produces similar results.

I left the roll sitting in various closets over the years, mostly unused. Art is one of those things that only works in the right state of mind, approached with a healthy amount of obsession. Getting motivated to work on art projects requires more habit than inspiration; I need everything ready before my muse is ready go, or my muse gets bored and buggers off. Leaving my linoleum in a roll in the back of a closet kept me at arm’s length from one of my passions for many years.

Just before I got married a good friend gave me a set of art-grade linoleum plates. It took me years before I was ready to use these supplies, mosly because I didn’t want to mess up the expensive material. These supplies became my motivation to use the cheap-bastard lino, though, as it was a way to prepare for the real thing. Over the years my wife added to my inventory of art stuff until I was eventually fully stocked. Even after having all of the right equipment it still took me years before I was carving regularly.

There are many reasons that I wandered away from inspiration and expression, but more interesing is that the journey back was mostly a matter of intent. Over the last few years I’ve started to make room for my art stuff, in places where I’ll actually use it. I make time for it now and consider it a way to recover from life and work. I also spend a lot of time looking for inspiration, reflecting, and relaxing. I have to do these things–all of them–or I find reasons not to bother expressing myself.

A few years ago before we moved from the island I took my roll of lino and split it all into smaller, more managable pieces. The roll, after having been stuffed in a closet for most of a decade, had warped badly and I assumed that most of it was ruined. I cut it and left the pieces in a pile in a cupboard for a few years, and their collective weight returned the lino to a usable state. Today I found that pile, and a few piles of never-warped pre-sized plates.

There are hundreds of plates worth of the stuff waiting to be carved up, and even a large piece of the art-grade stuff waiting for a special inspiration. Knowing that I won’t run out for a while is motivating, as it defeats the cheap-bastard-reasons for not starting another art project. It’s also cool to see that something I bought on a whim 10 years ago for a few bucks has been so much fun.

I’ve been thinking this week about how I learn stuff. I spend most of my time learning, as technology never stands still (and even if it did, there’s enough knowledge to be had that I’d never find it all anyway). I love learning too, as it expands the universe of what’s possible and how to get there.

One thing that works well for me is to always be looking at how other people do things. For photography, Flickr has some incredible tools for looking at how millions of people take pictures. Some weeks I’ll spend hours pouring over recent posts, tagging the ones that I find especially interesting. Just a few months of doing it has changed the way I think about photography. The effect was unintended too, as I was only looking at the work of others.

Authors like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King call it feeding the muse. Our muse is the part of our consciousness that finds the best way to do something (and what that something is). The muse writes our stories, paints our pictures, and frames our photographs. It’s a being of sorts that needs to be fed, excercised, and used for musing regularly.

Regularly reading Flickr feeds my artistic muse. It’s a healthy diet too, as there is so much nutrition in the skilled photographers I find there. And as a result of the regular feedings and the exercise of practice, I’m starting to see photography in a completely different light. Colours and textures jump out at me now, and I don’t even need to think about exposure or depth of field, I starting to just know it by instinct. Not that I’m a pro yet, but it’s starting to feel comfortable.

Building software is similar. Designers and developers need to have healthy muses, and they need to get a lot of practice at the craft. The time I spend looking at other people’s software feeds my design sense, and I end up building much better software because of it. Not that I don’t have to think, as I have to carefully filter what I feed the muse (you can’t just feed it everything as if it were healthy), but filtering is a lot easier than rote learning.

So after months of feeding my photographer’s sense and years of feeding my developer’s sense, they start to take on a life of their own. I start to see useful paths to things. My spidey senses tingle when danger lurks, and I start to find it easier to learn. And most important, I become more comfortable with the process of doing it, which allows me to think more about what I’m creating.

Lost your creative spark? Try some of the suggestions at 100 ideas, good food for your muse.

CSS Thesis, a gallery of beautiful CSS-based sites. An excellent resource for feeding your design muse.

The Museum of Food Anomalies