“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

Albert Einstein

Nature inspires creativity

Sometimes, I get stuck for ideas and I’m sure this happens to you too. Not just artistic ideas but ideas in general. I feel stuck and everything feels dull. One of the ways I is that I find art inspiration from nature. I go for a walk, cycle, swim or go surfing. Nature is a ‘wellspring’ for ideas and also a great healer. As with Einstein’s quote above, when we look into nature, we can gain a clearer understanding of things.

A really good focused technique for creative ideas, is to go and look for natural forms such as plant structures and find particular things about them that interest you.

How To Make Cities Of The Imagination

For example, during the making of my ‘Design An Imaginary City Book’, the overall form of the city I was making was not going to my liking. To get a break, I went for a walk and found snails stacked on top of each other on a leaf. A light switched on in my head and this inspired me to make a tower like, organic city! So by doing this, you will find inspiration and new fresh ideas.

Other Creatives Who Have Been Inspired By Nature

Throughout the ages many other artists, architects and designers have been inspired by nature. Although a scientist, Ernst Haeckel, made many drawing studies direct from nature. His most famous book, Kunstformen der Natur (known in English as Art Forms in Nature) is a comprehensive study of forms within nature. If you are an artist or designer, I would recommend you reading it!

Kunstformen der Natur (1904)

Even perhaps Buckminster Fuller gained inspiration for the further development of the geodesic dome concept from nature the lightweight structure, in my view is reminiscent of a leaf structure. These are only  a few examples of creative people who have gained inspiration from nature. After all, nature is all around us so it is only logical that it has been one of the major things that ha given us so much inspiration throughout the ages. Not only can the forms of nature inspire artists but at the same time the functions within natural systems can inspire the architect and designer. So if you look for inspiration in nature, you are in good company with some of the greatest creative people in history!

A Simple Exercise Of How To Get Inspiration From Nature

thistle

Today, I went bouldering at Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is one of the best places for bouldering in the centre of a city I have experienced on my travels. It is also a place of natural beauty and different types of shrubs and plants.

After my bouldering routine, I decided to focus carefully on one thing because nature, like cities can throw so much sensory stimuli at us that is is often difficult to focus properly or formulate a clear set of ideas. So I found some thistle heads and thought that they would be interesting to study.

I took it back home with me. I made two pages of spontaneous sketches and notes. Here are the results. Unlike people like Haeckel, my aim wasn’t to make a beautifully illustrated page. It was to expand and explore ideas for either my sculpture installation work or 2d artwork.

thistledrawingstudy1

thistledrawingstudy2

To throw more light upon this, here is an accompanying video I made.

Now You Do It!

Here is a simple exercise like the one I did above –

1. Go out and find a plant form that interests you, sketch it, you can look to make a nice finished piece of art. I prefer to make something quickly as an ideas sketch though. It is entirely up to you.
2. Nature can be a bombardment of information, or “Too Much Information”. So if you concentrate on one thing, it is almost like a meditation, a highly focused study and at the same time, ideas for your creative projects can jump out from this focused study.
3. Feel free to send me the results and ideas of what you did, I will get back to you with any ideas that I feel can help you expand your study onwards and upwards.

If you would like to contact me for a free 10 minute Skype lesson/consultation to give you further ideas and help you get the most out of your ideas for your plant form studies or anything else. You can see how I teach and if you want to have more lessons you can then decide to book more without no sales pressure from me! click on this link to get a ten minute free lesson.

Going Further

Here are just two links for you to expand your thinking about natural forms and inspiration with creativity. I could make a massive list here but the best thing for you to do it to type into a Google image search, terms such as “art inspired by nature”. There is so much out there about this and it is good for you to find what inspires you the most!

An interesting TED talk by designer Ross Lovegrove who is inspired by organic forms for his designs.

This link is from Wikipedia and gives further information about Ernst Haeckel and here is his fascinating book, Kunstformen der Natur (known in English as Art Forms in Nature). I am also going to do another extensive blog post about inspiration from natural forms but next time using 3d graphics, so sign up for my newsletter, Twitter or Facebook to get notification of this and lots of other stuff.

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