The Bigger Picture

Lately, I've been thinking about paying more attention to the bigger picture and making room for the people and things that really matter. 

For Marmalade Moon this mindset means building blocks of really useful tutorials and guides for harnessing your creativity with your iPhone or iPad. To make room for this development, I'll be slowing down my blogging pace, publishing new posts once a week, on Mondays. 

Just now I'm writing a tutorial for how to organise your digital iPhone photos and I've only just put together a new guide for Top Apps for Photo Effects, Filters and Post Processing. Hope you enjoy it! 

Some other things in the works are new iPhoneography art shows with student work from my recent courses and interviews with developers of exciting apps for mobile photography and art.

I'm delighted to introduce free promo codes for interesting art and photo apps as a new club perk for members of Club Marmalade Moon! Promo codes are handed out on a first come, first serve basis and they have been going like hotcakes! 

Club Hiccups

A technical hiccups, a fairy in the machine, that's what I discovered had happened when I heard from members of Club Marmalade Moon, who wondered why they weren't getting their club letters. If this has happened to you, simply sign up again to have your membership renewed. I'm very sorry about the inconvenience! 

The Color of Love

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” Marc Chagall

How beautiful and inspiring, and what a perfect quote for the month of February, the host of Valentine's Day!

I just put together this desktop wallpaper with the quote set on a cherry red background. Designed for iPhone, iPod and iPad. 

It's going to be the club perk that's delivered with the February issue of the Marmalade Monthly, that you get (for free) as a member of Club Marmalade Moon. 

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” Marc Chagall

A More Simple & Flexible Year

A More Simple & Flexible Year

It's a new year, and I've been looking at how I can make my digital life more simple and easy. Consolidating and renewing. Refocusing, pruning and reinventing my digital life. It's a process. Slowing down to savour my experiences and to connect more fully with others.

Here are some of the changes I've made: 

• Back up my mobile photos with Dropbox
• Reevaluate the apps I use for mobile art and photography and sort them into folders
• Delete unused apps on my iPhone and iPad to make it easier to stay focused.  
• New email routine. Emails that don't require instant action or an immediate response, get popped into a folder named Monday, and on Mondays it's email day.
• Simplify how I distribute my news, so that Club Marmalade Moon now also delivers you updates from the blog. 
• Get a juicer for the studio! New, healthy liquid lunches!

Updates Made Easy for You

To make it convenient and more flexible for you, you can now choose if you'd like to get your updates on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and you'll also receive exclusive, free content for members of Club Marmalade Moon. 

Tidbits. Consolidated News Bits

Last year I started a regular feature on this blog, where I bring the best bits of news I find on the web back home to Marmalade Moon in Tidbits. It's a weekly mix of inspiration, sparks of genius, beauty, illumination and laughter illustrated with my mobile photos. 

Have you been making any changes to your digital life this year?

The Creative Mind

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. 

When I think about using your iPhone to harness your creativity, this quote comes to mind: 

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. 
~ Terri Guillemets

Because your smartphone is no longer a phone with a camera, it's become a camera that you also can take regular calls with. You're using your mobile phone to take calls from your soul, and expressing them creatively. 

You're using your iPhone as a tiny, portable studio that fits in your pocket or handbag and that doesn't create a mess to clean up when you've finished. Exploring a new kind of contemporary art form, where you can express yourself creatively as you move through your day. 

I felt so inspired by this quote, that I made a desktop wallpaper as a club perk that comes with the December issue of the Marmalade Monthly, that you get (for free) as a member of Club Marmalade Moon. It's accompanied by four minimalist wallpapers in solid colours. Adapted for iPhone, iPod and iPad. 

A Stolen Creative Moment

Sometimes life gets so busy that there's just doesn't seem to be any time left for personal creative expression. But as Emily pointed out, that's when photography comes to the rescue. She says that the "opportunity to record a moment every single day is what keeps me sane. It keeps me seeing (the beauty around me) and allows me to express myself but only takes a moment to complete". I couldn't agree more, after all, one image takes less than a second to make. 

Here's a creative moment, an image shot with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone, testing the new FreePak I mentioned in my last Friday Tidbits. A moment captured between a ton of cut-off dates for my work as a freelance designer, a mentoring session with a Creative iPhoneography alumnus, writing the December letter for members of Club Marmalade Moon, creating a special treat to go with the Club Letter, and dinner with my brother (who took the photo in the photo) and his wonderful girlfriend. 

What are your tips for finding creative time? 

An Update on Creative Minutes

It's been a fortnight since I started the Creative Minutes Project, where I've been trying to find ways to have fun growing my creative projects organically, each day, in small bite sized chunks of time and I've documented the process here on my blog. So how has it worked out?

Well, sometimes I've cheated. Especially when I worked on the watercolour studies of trees, that lead to the image "Blue Branches". I spent a lot longer than 15 minutes on these studies, but each time I started working on them, I thought to myself that "I only need to put in quarter of an hour", and perhaps that got me going long enough to get absorbed and into a state of flow...

It's been a joy for me to document my creative process and to show it to my visitors. I feel that the creative work I do, even in small blocks of time, was made visible through this project, and it was empowering to see that even when time was short, I had indeed been developing my creative ideas.

I also felt it was very rewarding to prioritise my personal creativity in this way. No, cooking or playing with children or picking a fabric for a sofa did not count although I think all these things are creative activities.

Turning this project into something I blogged about, rather than simply doing on my own, did have an influence on the outcome. On one hand, blogging about it took time too, to add to the actual Creative Minutes. On the other hand, it made me accountable, and helped me stay on track. And it made me feel less shy about showing my unfinished work to the world, the creative process.

It's been fun to share this process here on my blog, but I think that if I continued blogging about it daily, I would risk that it turning into being "for show and not for blow" so I'm thinking of continuing my Creative Minutes in an offline journal in the future, just to keep for myself. Actually, perhaps I'll blog about it again, but not on a permanent basis.

My blogging activities are winding down now and I'll be focusing on completing work that needs to be finished before the holidays, redecorating the studio, migrating to brand new iMacs as well as sending a winter holiday letter to members of Club Marmalade Moon, releasing two winter wonderland wallpapers, and preparing for Christmas. I can't wait to start the New Year making something with the pattern that emerged in The Red Bird! Wait, did I say something about slowing down?