The Creativity Project

Book advocate Colby Sharp presents more than forty beloved, award-winning, diverse and bestselling authors and illustrators in a creative challenge! Colby Sharp invited more than forty authors and illustrators to provide story starters for each other; photos, drawings, poems, prose, or anything they could dream up. When they received their prompts, they responded by transforming these seeds into any form of creative work they wanted to share. The result is a stunning collection of words, art, poetry, and stories by some of our most celebrated children book creators. A section of extra story starters by every contributor provides fresh inspiration for readers to create works of their own. Here is an innovative book that offers something for every kind of reader and creator! With contributions by Sherman Alexie, Tom Angleberger, Jessixa Bagley, Tracey Baptiste, Sophie Blackall, Lisa Brown, Peter Brown, Lauren Castillo, Kate DiCamillo, Margarita Engle, Deborah Freedman, Adam Gidwitz, Chris Grabenstein, Jennifer L. Holm, Victoria Jamieson, Travis Jonker, Jess Keating, Laurie Keller, Jarret J. Krosoczka, Kirby Larson, Minh Lê, Grace Lin, Kate Messner, Daniel Nayeri, Naomi Shihab Nye, Debbie Ohi, R.J. Palacio, Linda Sue Park, Dav Pilkey, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Dan Santat, Gary Schmidt, John Schu, Colby Sharp, Bob Shea, Liesl Shurtliff, Lemony Snicket, Laurel Snyder, Javaka Steptoe, Mariko Tamaki, Linda Urban, Frank Viva, and Kat Yeh.

A collection of fifty-two weekly projects is designed to reveal how the author's personal creative and artistic journey transformed his life and provides inspiration for the reader's own artistic odyssey through such endeavors as painting, writing, drawing, carving, singing, dancing, cooking, and performing. Original.

Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom presents a systems-based approach to examining creativity in education that aims to make participating in invention and innovation accessible to all students. Moving beyond the gifted-versus-ungifted debate present in many of today’s classrooms, the book’s inclusive framework situates creativity as a participatory and socially distributed process. The core principle of the book is that individuals are not creative, ideas are creative, and that there are multiple ways for a variety of individuals to participate in the development of creative ideas. This dynamic reframing of invention and innovation provides strategies for teachers, curriculum designers, policymakers, researchers, and others who seek to develop a more equitable approach towards establishing creative learning experiences in various educational settings.

Paint outside the lines! Jumpstart your creativity and inject new life into your art. Struggling to get started? Paralyzed by the fear of failure? Find yourself falling back on the same colors again and again? Just plain stuck? It happens to every artist sooner or later. What can you do to get unstuck quickly and painlessly? Creative Freedom presents 52 strategies for getting out of ruts and venturing beyond your comfort zone, courtesy of 25 artists who have been there, done that. Each approach is illustrated with a step-by-step painting demonstration. Together, they help you experiment with different mediums, new color combinations, fresh approaches to favorite subjects, and more. Try one a week for a year of creative adventure. Or dip in whenever you're feeling inspired. You may be surprised at the creative liberation that comes from... • Painting with your other hand. • Going big with your canvas and brushes. • Painting fast with 10-minute studies. • Limiting your palette. • Starting with a random line drawing or custom painting surface. • Zooming in on one small detail of a landscape for abstract results. • Copying the work of an Old Master. Featuring an exciting variety of styles and mediums (oil, watercolor, acrylic and pastel), novel perspectives and an invigorating sense of play, this book is sure to generate creative sparks and joyful painting sessions. Getting unstuck has never been so fun!

Inspired by artist Tamara Laporte’s popular online art classes (willowing.org), Create Your Life Book presents 18 step-by-step mixed-media drawing and painting projects that encourage self-fulfillment through the creative process. Tamara’s kind, non-judgmental voice guides your way. What is holding you back? Where do you want to go? Let go of the past! Use these expressive exercises to help you recognize your personal challenges and other obstacles, then work through them. Let go of limiting beliefs, find courage, feel gratitude, heal pain, and develop self-love as you playfully create. Each themed chapter presents four to five two-part projects. First, you will explore a common issue that hampers creativity and/or positive self-worth. The second portion is a step-by-step mixed-media art project designed to help you work through that issue. Just a few of the explorations: Let go of what no longer serves you by taking stock of what’s holding you back, then create a zentangle butterfly to symbolize you flying away from those limiting things. Embrace and love your inner quirky bird by taking an inventory of your quirky traits, then create a bird that celebrates them. Heal old wounds by writing a letter to yourself as a child, then create a house to keep your inner child safe. Adding rich variety to the messages and art inspiration, some of the project outlines have been contributed by Tamara's guest teachers: Roxanne Coble, Andrea Gomoll, Alena Hennessy, Mystele Kirkeeng, Ivy Newport, and Effy Wild, each of whom are noted mixed-media artists in their own right. The final chapter presents a simple binding method for creating a keepsake book of your Life Book projects. Steeped in inspirational images and uplifting affirmations, Create Your Life Book can help you achieve both personal and creative growth.

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.” —Jeanette Winterson What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative? Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code. “As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?...In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.” —Financial Times “Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.” —The Times

This book was written as a help for individual persons who want to organize their creativity, be it for science (incl. engineering and commercial projects), art, or private projects. Its aim is to enlarge your options when having ideas and to improve the chance of realizing creative projects.It is written as a practical handbook and describes how organization can support generating, capturing, collecting (incl. enlarging, restructuring, etc.) and realizing ideas.While creativity "techniques" are dealt with, the focus is on the infrastructure to enable you to capture your fleeting ideas and cultivate them to finally realize them as creative projects.

Miller and Sharp provide the game-changing tools and information teachers and administrators need to dramatically increase children's access to and engagement with books.