Printables

Print me!

I am making a goal for myself – Starting today, I want to accomplish at least one task a day, no matter how minute.  I desperately need to get my creative juices flowing and I’ve been trying to browse different blogs and sites looking for inspiration.

See, the problem is that when I see something I like, I say to myself “wow, I’d love to design something like that” and then I say, “but… it’s already been done, so why bother?”  I realized last night after watching a few videos on This Site that nothing is ever truly original – creatives always pull inspiration from somewhere.  This has been enlightening for me because it explains why I never create anything anymore – I simply don’t like copying people and feel that if I am copying them, there is no point and that I’m a hack.  And yet I see copying and emulation happening everywhere, even on respectable blogs.  People take a recipe they found somewhere in a book or another site and copy it, changing it ever so slightly.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a completely original recipe on ANY blog – they are always derivatives of other recipes.

This leads me to my next thought – if I like something I see somewhere, why not take that idea and make it my own?  My husband is the one who said it, but he’s right.  At the very least, it will get the ideas flowing again – something that hasn’t happened in years and years.

So today, I told myself – stop reading other people’s blogs (ok, don’t stop, but don’t stop *there*) and DO something yourself.  Create something every day.  Even if I am simply copying outright by making a recipe I found somewhere, that’s ok.  If I change it to my taste, all the better, but it’s not necessary.  Maybe the next day, it’ll be some clip art or a card or something.

So today, as I was browsing blogs, I noticed a lot of owls.  Cute owl clip art, stuffed owls, paper owls.  All kinds of them and they were adorable.  I find myself really wanting to make some owl pillows and little stuffed felt owls, but of course that takes money to buy fabric and supplies so that will have to wait.  So I turned to my trusty Illustrator CS5 and made some clip art owls for back to school.  I don’t have any kids, but that doesn’t mean no one else does!  These little owls are simple, but you can cut them out and use them as decoupage on notebooks, lockers (with removable adhesives or better yet, printed out on vinyl and cut out), even on a desk or calendar or… whatever else you can think of.  You could even print them out and use them as inspiration of your own – cut them out of felt and appliqué onto a child’s dress, skirt, jacket, pants, backpack… whatever.

Enjoy!  You can find the file here.

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