Tag: Vision board

Always extra room in my closet for some…Dress me Inspiration

B.I.C., Ink Slaying, Inspiration, Kim Koning, Notes on Wrestling The Muse, WIP, Writing

“Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.” – Rene Konig

I know that I have been lax in posting on the blogs but hopefully this post of inspiration will make up for it. Though I am a writer and should be more focused on words than anything else, I am also a very visual person. I have spoken before about how I create vision boards for each of my WIPs and even for future works. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but for me one picture can spark off a whole manuscript. One of my favourite forms of vision boards are when I find clothing for my characters. I never need an excuse to stroll through fashion magazines/sites but when I can mark it off as “work” in research, the satisfaction is doubled.

"Everything you own should have value, either because it's functional or beautiful or you just love it."-- Peter Walsh

A week ago I was invited to sign up to a new social network: Pinterest. I had heard about it for a while beforehand and had even had friends who signed up but I resisted the lure of another social network. The resistance proved futile and my curiosity finally won out. I wanted to know what all the cool “kids” were on about. I wanted to be in on the secret too. So a friend kindly invited me (like most deliciously secretive societies, Pinterest membership is by invite/request for the time being) to Pinterest and within a few moments I was in and had my own Pinterest boards.

 “Fashions fade, style is eternal.” – Yves Saint Laurent

Pinterest is fantastic for a person like me who is a vision board junkie. It is set up much like a regular cork board vision board you would set up at home. You create all these boards, title them, describe them and then you “pin” your interesting images, either your own from your computer’s drive or pinned/linked from other online sites. The great thing with Pinterest is that the original creator of the image is credited and you also have the original link from where you found the image in the first place. This cuts down on your web-browser bookmarks and keeps all your visual inspiration in one tidy place.

” ‘Style’ is an expression of individualism mixed with charisma. Fashion is something that comes after style.”           – John Fairchild

So here for example is my Pinterest board for my current WIP trilogy – The Curse`d. So on this board I have a few of the images that I have used for inspiration for my WIP, whether it be settings, culture types, clothing and characters.

“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” – Coco Chanel

Which brings me to CLOTHING and STYLE. Two of my favourite interests but also vital to a story. I don’t know about you, but if I can picture the characters the way they are dressed it really gives me a picture in my mind. The type of clothing worn by some characters can tell me much about who they are. It also tells me when and where the story is set. Clothing/Style of characters can tell me about whether the character is a businessman/woman, a lady/man of leisure, a woman/man of action and it can also tell me what the character wants me to know about them. Clothing can also be symbolic of a character’s emotions. Memorable outfits by literary characters/film characters come to mind at the drop of a hat and we can recall the stories behind these outfits. Think of the green dress in Atonement or the fire dress in The Hunger Games. Clothing can make a character stand out from all the others. In a sense the fashions in a novel are characters in and of themselves.

 “Fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt.” – Elsa Schiaparelli

I love the societies that my current trilogy is set in: a mix of contemporary urban, early Victorian society and Romany Gypsies. The inspiration for the clothing is almost limitless. You have the exquisite formality of the Victorian era, the romanticism of the Romany Gypsy culture and the simplicity and understated sexiness of the urban-contemporary.

“What I really love about them… is the fact that they contain someone’s personal history…I find myself wondering about their lives. I can never look at a garment… without thinking about the woman who owned it. How old was she? Did she work? Was she married? Was she happy?… I look at these exquisite shoes, and I imagine the woman who owned them rising out of them or kissing someone…I look at a little hat like this, I lift up the veil, and I try to imagine the face beneath it… When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you’re not just buying the fabric and thread – you’re buying a piece of someone’s past.” – Isabel Wolff

So here for your pleasure are some style/clothing images that have been the inspiration behind my WIP.

This is the inspiration for one of my MCs.

This dress is the dress that my MC will mean in a key moment in her story.

This is another key piece worn by my MC later in her story.

The inspiration for the debonair man who catches my MC’s eye and heart.

This is inspiration for my second MC but later in the trilogy.

This is my inspiration for my hero.

This is inspiration for my second MC.

Writers: What do you use for fashion inspiration in your novels?

Readers: What are your favourite outfits from the pages of fiction?

 

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2011 Monday Mental Muscle #1: Visual Prompts & Vision Boards

Kim Koning, Monday Mental Muscles, Notes on Wrestling The Muse
Think you already knew the old saying: "A...
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I follow an online poetry site called One Stop Poetry that never fails to inspire me. They have some amazing poetry but more than this they do great creative prompts each week.

So for today’s Monday Mental Muscle and the first Monday Mental Muscle of 2011, I am going to borrow from this site.

So the first exercise for the week is to follow the picture prompt from this week’s One Shoot Sunday. Look at the picture at the bottom of this link in this prompt and write a poem, flash fiction or a piece of prose from this picture prompt.

Visual prompts are something I use quite often creatively speaking. I am a very visual person and am often inspired by things I see and observe. I guess that is why I love photography so much. When I look through the viewfinder on my camera, I see things that I may miss when looked at just with the eye. The viewfinder tends to focus on one specific scene and everything else seems to fade away.

Visual prompts are also a fantastic writing tool when recalling the adage:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

People are very visual creatures. We often have to see something to believe or understand it. So this week, think about what visual prompts you use in your writing or other creative prompts.

The second exercise of the week for Monday Mental Muscles is in line with visual prompting and visual inspiration.

Vision Boards

  • What is a vision board?
  • Why do you need one in 2011?
  • How do you make a vision board?

Vision boards are something that I have been using the last couple of years. I believe a vision board is essential to any and all areas of your life. Vision boards are not a new idea. If you spend enough time in the blogosphere, there will be numerous methods of Vision Boards. If you google “Vision Board”, you will get 4, 400, 000 results in 0.20 seconds. I have read many of these online links to Vision Boards but one of the best explanations of Vision Boards that I have read is written by Christine Kane. These are three links that tell you why Christine uses Vision Boards and how to create and use one for yourself.

Vision Boards: A Quick Story

How to Make a Vision Board

The Complete Guide to Vision Boards

So your exercise for the week/month is to create a new vision board. You can either do this manually with paper and scissors or if you prefer you can have one online. The following are links to sites where you can host/create your own online digital vision board:

Oprah’s O Dream Board

Vision Board Site

Catalogue of Dreams

I have used all three sites myself with ease and success. I use both a digital vision board that I save as my desktop wallpaper and a manual vision board that I keep above my desk in my study. The digital one is great if you spend a lot of time on your computer or your laptop. It is especially useful to save your digital vision board as your desktop wallpaper because it will be a constant visual prompt.

Why use a Vision Board?

Many people, including all the above links expound on why you should use a vision board. The reason why I use a vision board is because as I mentioned before I am a very visual person. For me a Vision Board or a Dream Board is a place where I put visual prompts to inspire and encourage me to reach out for different goals in my life.

Every year, I do a new vision board for the month ahead that is a 12-month vision board. On top of this I also do monthly vision boards for short-term goals. I also focus on different areas in my life as well as my writing and do vision boards for those. The way I understand the intention of creating a vision board is to have a visual tool of focus that you can look at each day and imprint in your thoughts. in other words, you open up your mind’s eye, so to speak. For me it is like the ultimate figurative viewfinder on my goals, aspirations and dreams for both the present and the future. I use it to visually carry out my goals and aspirations.

I am not a list person. I try to make lists and then invariably end up misplacing those said lists which defeats the purpose of list making. So if you are not a list-making person, try the idea of a Vision Board. The visual part of our brain is incredibly powerful. It is said that most of what we see, we do not immediately take in consciously but it enters our sub-conscious and is stored there. So letting the images of a vision board enter your mind’s eye on a daily basis can have the power to rewire your brain and focus your intentions towards the visual images, prompts and inspirations that you allow to saturate your internal mind’s eye.

So these are your tasks for this week. Make this week a week of vision and let it saturate your focus. Put a viewfinder frame around your goals and aspirations and then take/make a picture. That is why and how I use Vision Boards.

Sharpen your visual skills and focus your viewfinder.

Happy Exercising!

Feel free to share with others, by commenting, the way visual prompts and vision boards work for you.


© All rights reserved Kim Koning.

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