Uncovering Your Creative Cravings
Learn how creative cravings spark new inspiration & opportunities in your work.
guest blog post by: Krista Kankula
I carefully dolled out 7 bowls of icing and mixed them into varying shades of peach, light rose and salmon pink. All that was left to do was decorate the wedding cakes.
Would it be as fun as all those youtube videos I’d been watching made it seem? Would it feel like painting OR would I end up covered in icing and staring at a delicious disaster?
One of my best friend’s had asked me to bake and decorate three cakes for her wedding reception. She didn’t ask me because I owned a cake decorating company or because I was an avid baker (I wasn’t). I’d been talking about my obsession with cake decorating and she gave me the perfect excuse to FINALLY try it for myself.
I was pursuing and exploring what I like to call a creative craving.
This wasn’t my first experience with a creative craving. Six years ago I had a similar feeling to paint abstract art and last year it was to write a short story inspired by my grandmother. And just last month a craving to learn about and photograph...wait for it… FUNGI.
What is a creative craving anyway?
A creative craving is the urge we get to explore or learn more about a topic or activity or to play or create in a certain way.
These cravings might show up as your intuition nudging you to create or express yourself using a specific medium. They may show up as feeling compelled or curious to try creating in a new way. Or the craving might show up as something that catches your eye, you feel drawn to or inspired by.
It’s easy to skim over these cravings. Dismiss them as a distraction from what you’re currently creating OR label them as something that doesn’t fit with you and how you normally create.
But noticing and exploring these creative cravings provides us with so many fun and interesting opportunities, like:
Looking inside ourselves for inspiration instead of passively scrolling hoping we might stumble on something that sparks us
Incorporating new approaches, mediums and perspectives into our existing creative practice
Practicing different creative skills (and failing)
Meeting and learning from other creatives
Gathering inspiration and ideas we can turn to when or if we get stuck in a creative rut
Sometimes a creative craving turns into a craft we are so in love with, something we cannot imagine our lives without. This is what happened to me once I started painting.
Sometimes they lead to another line on our failure resume, lessons or new connections, projects, clients or careers.
And other times our creative cravings are more like a one-hit-wonder. It was fun while it lasted but it’s not something we have a desire to continue creating. That’s what happened with me and cake decorating.
While exploring my creative craving to decorate cakes didn’t change my life, painting has.
That’s the thing about creative cravings. They require us to take a risk.
Because on the surface we can’t tell where this craving will take us or what we’ll get out of the experience.
But it’s a risk that I’m willing to bet is worth taking every time.
It’s worth taking because ignoring these cravings to create means ignoring our desire for self-expression, curiosity and imagination.
Following our creative cravings is less about where they take us and more about what we discover about ourselves and our relationship with creativity along the way.
And that’s our job as creatives, to notice our creative cravings and to be curious enough to discover something in the process of pursuing them.
I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite questions to sit with and riff on, to help you uncover what creative cravings you have and how you can begin exploring them.
Krista Kankula is a Creativity Coach & Facilitator. She focuses on helping people cultivate a joyful relationship with creativity so they can create in a consistent, fun and gentle way and use creativity as a tool to know and trust themselves more deeply.
Krista hosts a monthly creativity workshop called the Possibility Picnic and offers a 1:1 coaching program called Being Joyfully Creative!
You’ll often find her painting with her favourite shade pink, cozied up on the couch writing creative cheers or hiking with her partner and pup. Connect with Krista and learn more about her work on Instagram or at https://kristakankula.com/.
