My first forays back into the studio have found me feeling uninspired and stuck. I know the best way around this is to just sit down, get to work, and focus on getting my hands moving rather than on the results. This often works very well with me because I am a process driven artist and I created in a spontaneous manner anyway.

I grabbed my knife and a piece of paper, made some quick decisions about what I wanted to do, and then began cutting.

I’ve used this leaf shape many times before, but this time I wanted to work smaller and closer together, and end up with an overall form that wasn’t round. Working in a radial naturally lends itself a circular form but I wanted to see how it could work in a more squared composition.

I cut the design until it was about eight inches in diameter and then began working it into a square. It looked beautiful at that point but I decided to keep pursuing the idea. It went through a phase where I thought I’d ruined it but pushed on and came through to the end where I’ve achieved the squarish form (I was never going for a perfect square).

I don’t think I will work this small as a general rule, even though it was interesting to try it out, because it doesn’t read well overall.

Even though this took many hours and xacto blades to create, I consider it a sketch resulting from an exercise and not finished work. It did the trick though, because I find myself INSPIRED!

It’s that time of year again, not the Christmas season, but the coming of the closing of the year. A time when I always seem to run out of steam for coming up with content for my blog. But I have monthly goals around how many posts to write and it’s a good thing too because it forces me to meet them.

When it comes to art it is VERY important to work at something even when you don’t feel inspired, because there is no better way to find that inspiration. I’ve done some of my best and most surprising work under these circumstances. I think this also applies to blogging.

The visual portion of this entry is of two paper cut designs I created while sitting in the window at Bird on a Wire Creations a few weekends back. I was between projects and was uncertain about what I wanted to work on next. I brought small sheets of coloured paper with me and decided to cut in whatever way came to mind. I was not feeling inspired or compelled in any way to create and yet I came away with two lovely small sketches.

Inspiration doesn’t always doesn’t always appear on command, but she’ll show up if you will.

Irving Harper is a well-known industrial designer, and a design director at Herman Miller agency. For the past fifty years he’s been creating paper sculptures in his spare time as a way to relieve stress. This video gives a tour through his home and shares the amazing variety of work he’s created from paper.

It’s very timely to come across this right now as I’ve been working on a large paper engineering project this week. Thank you to Kirsti for sharing it with me.

Check out more videos in the Why Design series.