The development of figurative thinking

Fiery greetings, dear habravchane!

In my debut article, I want to tell you about the games-games on the development of figurative thinking, which will be useful not only to people of creative professions: unlike the exercises on the development of imagination, in which the right hemisphere dominates, the pumping of figurative thinking actively involves analytical skills, and this is a symbiosis of the two hemispheres. Therefore, these exercises are perfect not only for obtaining any fruits for people whose work is somehow connected with figurative information, but also for any person who wants to have a sharp mind and well-coordinated interaction of both hemispheres of the brain.

Exercises should be performed in a comfortable environment: no time limit, no competitive motivation and criticism of actions, the average degree of achievement motivation. In the exercises, not only the number of responses produced, but also their originality is appreciated. You can test your imaginative thinking in one of the chapters of the wonderful training manual “ Diagnosis and Activation of Creative Abilities ”.
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Training on homegrown raw materials (squiggles, blots, Drudles, etc.) are welcome. The attached examples to the exercises, which do not have a link to the author, are performed by me.

Each exercise can be devoted to a separate article (which I will try to do in the future), for now a quick overview of the main ones.

Drudly
One of the advertising campaigns of the Brazilian school of creativity was based on this simple exercise, when a simple line or figure needs to be painted at its discretion:



You can use the previously replicated simple figures on the A4 sheet or build on your own spontaneous lines during the exercise.

Blots
Unlike the previous exercise, where we used lines, this requires inspired by solid shapes: blots, stains, clouds, and other abstractions:


Blots may not necessarily be monochrome: see what cycle of works based on colored spots turned out to be a great Portuguese illustrator Filipe dos Santos:




Figurative expression
The essence of the exercise in the story verbal meaning units (phrases, sentences) in the figurative version.
Something this exercise resembles the good old rebuses. Indeed, such lessons often result in excellent “rebound” logos:





Authors: Richard Fonteneau , Jens Wickelgren , s-farm , Helms Workshop

If you do not want to spend time thinking about a phrase, you can use aphorisms, proverbs, slogans, titles and phrases from songs, films and other famous expressions:







There are popular illustrations in the network that display verbal expressions like “Bear gathers mushrooms in a fox”, “Chicken is not drying”, “Fish saw” and others:


By werebober

Those who wish to study in more detail the relationship between the sign and the meaning will be helped by semiotics .

In the image of
In this exercise, you need to find figurative synonyms of the object as a whole or its individual parts. For example: violin ~ waist ~ bottle.

The chain can be either centered (synonyms stem from the original version), or consistent (synonyms cling to the previous version), or chaotic (some sequence is not respected).

You can complicate the exercise and make chains not only in a figurative likeness, but also in functional, applied and other. This technique is called the visual matrix .

Kaleidoscope
The essence of this game is very simple and is based on the ratio of the object and our projection on it . In this game, we simply juggle our projections onto the observable. The beaten example is a glass half empty or full.

Simply write the options verbally. For those who are able to draw, more opportunities open up: you can take a fresh look at familiar personalities, familiar processes, everyday life and other aspects of our life:




From Britney's demobling album

That is why resources with such fruits are so popular (demotivators, blogs, for example, Wake up , groups in social networks): a fresh look at the hackneyed images, opinions, processes are always surprising and amusing.



This concludes my review. I would be happy to comment in which you tell about the techniques and exercises that are not mentioned in this article.