New Book: Caffeine for the Creative Mind
The other night I attended a mixer celebrating the release of a new book, Caffeine for the Creative Mind, by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield. Stefan and Wendy are part of a small, hot-snot ad agency called The Brainyard, which has been a client of Slappy Pictures for several years now (click here to check out a fun cartoony flash piece I did for them a while back).

Caffeine for the Creative Mind is a huge collection of short creative exercises designed to get your brain working and keep you thinking outside of the box. I've seen a lot of books on creativity over the years, and while most of them are a load of hooey, this one is actually pretty darn good. Peppered throughout the book are interviews with assorted creative types, and I was one of the people they interviewed. I'd love to paste the text of the interview here for you to read, but then you might not buy the book and Stefan would come over here and pound me. Stefan is 6' 8". If you want to find out more about the book, check out the website, http://www.creativestretching.com/.

In the back of the book, they had each of the interviewees complete a simple drawing exercise, which was to take a doodle and create whatever image that doodle sparked in your brain.
Here's the doodle they gave us: Here's what I came up with:

I contributed some other stuff to the book as well, from caricatures of the authors to artwork used as raw material for a couple exercises. It's always fun working with Stefan, and overall I think he and Wendy did a great job with the book.