Imagine you had the perfect studio, a limitless variety of materials available to you and all the time in the world to make your art. This is the kind of freedom many artists dream of, but in reality, such freedom can be overwhelming. Imagine you had all that, where would you begin?

Seth Godin has a great saying:

Realistically we’re always working within boundaries, often ones we’ve created for ourselves.

Resource constraints, timelines, lack of knowledge, low energy or even the edge of a sheet of paper or computer screen, are all boundaries that we each face at one time or another.

The thing is: the boundaries are only as restricting as we allow them to be.

I worked with many small clients at a local newspaper group where I was (for the only time in my life) gainfully employed. Their low budgets and need to make every advertising campaign really work make for a good constraint. So, I played my game within the boundaries and became very successful at ‘chip shop’ style advertising. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it!

Rather than viewing our boundaries as restrictions, the true creative mind sees the boundaries as empowering. You can’t do real work without edges, but Those edges don’t have to be defined in the same as everyone else’s.” I’m very lucky that my clients give me a lot of room to work in but i still like to have some client guidelines.

Even the term free reign is a constraint because what unsaid is that the free reign piece will look like all of my other work – I can’t just go off on some brand new tangent, i still have to produce work that looks like me.

So, instead of longing for creative freedom take creative control! Identify, define, and re-define the boundaries from which you work, whether it’s the edge of a page or the edge of what’s possible.