The arrival of New Year’s Day can be a time to channel new energy, creativity and ideas.
Putting pen to paper — scribbling, drawing, jotting — can help us spur that part of our brains.
Ayse Birsel, whose book “Design the Life You Love: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future” (Ten Speed Press) helps readers rethink life through writing and drawing, said such creative approaches can offer new ways to brainstorm.
Letting our minds wander, or ponder, in unconventional ways can offer different paths to goals and dreams. “If you can visualize the life you love, the one that you want to have, you’re so much closer to making it happen,” Birsel said.
The arrival of a new year is a great time to get reinvigorated — and whether that’s through a new hobby, a daily drawing meditation or a total rearrangement of your life, these books have it covered.
For life plans
“Your life is your most important project,” Ayse Birsel writes in her book, “Design the Life You Love: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future.” Everybody’s life can get overrun with obstacles presented by time restrictions, age and/or money. Birsel challenges readers to seek creative solutions to molding the life they want via four steps: deconstruction, point of view, reconstruction, expression. “Design the Life You Love” is the product of Birsel’s employing her own creative process: She put it on paper, tested it with friends, offered it as a workshop, then eventually published this book. (Ten Speed Press, $19.99)
Long-term brainstorming
Perhaps you want a multiyear commitment to self-improvement. Consider “Q&A a Day for Creatives.” The philosophy is founded on the idea that a ritual daily drawing can keep your brain sharp. With a simple design, it has four years’ worth of pages, each with a one-question prompt. Questions range from “New Year’s resolutions? Draw one thing you’d like to achieve this year” to this December challenge: “Create a holiday gift-wrap pattern that suits you and your feelings about the season.” A grid of four empty boxes allows whatever artistic form seems best. From the “Q&A a Day” series, this one targets visual creativity but promises to be appropriate for all skill levels. It hopes that over the four years, the doodles will offer some perspective. (Crown Publishing Group, $16.95)
A new hobby
“Hand-Lettering for Everyone: A Creative Workbook” aims to recapture the care around cursive. Designer and illustrator Cristina Vanko, the book’s author, explains how hand-lettering is different from typography, handwriting and calligraphy. Vanko takes clear and contagious delight in explaining minutiae, like shape names for letter forms, from ampersand to descender. Step by step, with types and a chance to try them, it plants the seed of excitement around lettering, from monograms to a name on your coffee cup. (Perigee, $15.95)
For gratitude
“Instant Happy Journal: 365 Days of Inspiration, Gratitude, and Joy” by Karen Salmansohn offers prompts to inspire a daily dose of gratitude. Whether a scientific fact, question or quote, the goal is to realize more joyful moments in daily life. Hopefully, you begin the day with a positive intention and end the day with grateful reflection. Prompts range from “Reframe a story from your day so that failure = wisdom” to “What does the weekend of a successful person look like?” Dates are blank, so you can toss them in at your leisure. (Ten Speed Press, $16.99)
For inspiration
The new year can be a time to search for inspiration, and Robie Rogge and Dian G. Smith hope to feed that spark with their book, “Do One Thing Every Day That Inspires You: A Creativity Journal.” The authors want readers to allow space for epiphanies. The daily wisdom comes from sources as varied as artists, architects and actors. It starts with a quote from Henri Matisse: “Creativity takes courage.” They intend to push journalers to the edge or even outside of a creative comfort zone, with suggestions like making a cubist drawing of something in a bag or writing a myth of a constellation. (Crown Publishing Group, $12.95)
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