How to harvest a shape, 10 ways

CREATIVE FIELD NOTE from Field of Visions

Jan 31, 2025

Creativity is a lot like cooking. It goes much better if you have the ingredients before you start. Cooking supplies, like pots and pans, mean nothing if you don’t have your ingredients. In the same way, having art supplies means nothing if you don’t have your i n g r e d i e n t s.

Correct! Art supplies are not the ingredients for your art.

Ingredients, in this case, are the personal transmissions you record from your lived experience, out of which you can then create something.

The simplest way to bring forth your ingredients is to intentionally harvest them directly from your environments, both inner and outer. I am using shapes here as an approachable practice example. Like harvesting a vegetable, I invite you to an easy set of creative exercises in meaningful, unique shape-making.

The main idea is to have your shapes first, then make something with them. Instead of all at once. You don’t need to sit there and conjure your ingredients while you make with them - that’s like letting the oil heat and burn before you’ve chopped the carrots - stressful!

Let’s break it down.

◯ ◇ ◯ ◇ ◯

Supplies needed: a piece of paper or sketchbook and a pencil. Maybe some other stuff.

Your assignment: Try three of these. Bonus points: Try all 10.

Ten methods:

Close your eyes and take 10-100 breaths, and see if a shape appears. Whether it does or does not, open your eyes and immediately start drawing a shape without thinking about it. The shape has appeared.
Trace a shadow. It can be a crisp shadow, or a soft cloudlike shadow. Or it can be the opposite of a shadow, like a dancing light projection coming in the window and onto your wall, or the blobs of light that beam through the leaves onto the cement. Tracing a shadow is embodied photography, capturing a fleeting memory of a unique light-time-space-moment.
Seize the negative space. The shape that is created between your bent arm and the rest of your body when you put your hand on your hip. The shapes made in the empty space between a grouping of random objects, or objects that mean something signifiant to you. Any shape made of space whose edges are only defined by what surrounds it.
Cut paper in a playful and intuitive manner, without thinking about it at all, without trying to make anything specific.
Put on a piece of music and draw the shapes that happen of the sound.
Bring up a significant memory that made an impact on you. What do you think of first? Do you remember specific objects, or maybe it’s a feeling? Quickly sketch the outlines of whatever arises first in a simplified, non-precise way. Maybe you are the only one who secretly knows what these shapes represent.
Try to visually translate an emotional sensation in the body. Don’t think about it at all. Put the body in charge of the drawing and demote the mind. It doesn’t have to be symmetrical, even though the body sort of is. It doesn’t have to make sense.
Look at something in nature directly, or a photo you took of a place you visited that you love. Find shapes in these environments and copy them down without worrying about them being perfect. A crack in the sidewalk creates a shape on your path to work. A large rock in your favorite photo from a hike you loved on a trip you took. The curve of your child’s cheek in a baby photo of them sleeping…
Combine multiple shapes from a series of moments into one new hybrid shape.
Draw a line that represents a physical or emotional journey and then close it to make it into a shape.

Notes and tips:

Give each shape a title.
Designate a small sketchbook for only shape harvesting.
End up with an entire library of your own lived shapes.
Donate each shape to your personal shape museum and they can be lent out for free any time for you to use in a project or series.
By breaking up shape-harvesting and art-making into these two steps, it may be easier to cook.
Don’t worry about any of it and have fun.
With you ablaze, among the contours,
♡ -Kristen