The Importance of Creative Play

Creativity relieves anxiety and stress, but when I feel anxious or stressed, I struggle to feel creative. It’s the classic Catch 22. Voodoo Thrift Queen is the result of a personal assignment I gave myself, with the goal to enter a creative space and relieve the current day stresses of living during a pandemic. I told myself that it didn’t matter what I created, and it didn’t matter if it was good when it was done. I just needed to be on a creative journey. 

The assignment was simple – find a photo in my catalog, and paint over it with Adobe Fresco. I chose this portrait for the fun factor, hoping the fun part would help me get going. Honestly though, I still struggled. I just wasn’t ‘feeling’ it. I had to push myself through that negative space and make myself work on the project. After a few evenings of false starts, I found my way into that creative place where the painting started driving itself.

Success! I was having fun and feeling much less anxiety.

I employed a lot of different tools to create this, making the creative journey even more fun for me. The process started in Lightroom to find the photo. From Lightroom I went to Photoshop to mask the portrait. I saved the Photoshop file to Cloud docs so it would be available on my iPad. On the iPad I created decorative flowers and shapes with the iOrnament app. The ornament shapes were then converted to custom scatter brushes using Adobe Capture. These brushes were used in Adobe Fresco to paint her clothes and the background. Her hair was painted with a couple of custom hair brushes I previously created for a YouTube tutorial. The peacock feather was painted with brushes built into Fresco. I finished the painting with a few final touches back in Photoshop on my computer. The entire workflow was seamless because of Adobe’s Cloud docs and Creative Cloud Libraries. Thank you Adobe.

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