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About

Inspiration to live your creativity. One dose at a time.

“Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.” — Cecil B. DeMille

Melanie Sklarz

melanie turquoiseI inspire individuals and groups to tap into their creativity for personal and professional success, whether it’s a painting, marketing plan, or being everyday creative.

As a marketing and communications strategist, I bring a breadth of creative expertise to clients looking to develop and strengthen their brand.

A former educator and curator, I developed and led innovative programs for museums, most recently in Washington, DC.

I want to live in a world where everyone believes they are creative.

Also an informative speaker, I have facilitated workshops for creative women entrepreneurs, presented a parent workshop on raising creative kids, sat on a panel discussing women in blogging and taught college students how to find their tribe online by building their brand.

I am also a mixed media artist specializing in collage. My art has been exhibited at the FAVA Gallery in Oberlin, OH, the Dialogue Gallery in Buffalo, NY and The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, VA.

I earned a BA in Art History from Seton Hill University and a MA from the Ohio State University, where my research focused on women’s artistic production and activism.

Five {5} Creative Questions With Melanie

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Becoming a Life Change Artist

January 19, 2011 by 2 Comments

Are you planning to look for a new job, new career, or just a new perspective on life this year? Then Becoming a Life Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life by Fred Mandell, Ph.D and Kathleen Jordan, Ph.D is the book for you!

Before I planned to interview Kathy Jordan for my Five {5} Creative Questions series, I won a copy of her book. I was so excited that I dove right into it and have admitted that I never wanted it to end. Yes, it was that good.

I also have to admit, that as a trained art historian and personal development enthusiast, this is the book I wish I would have written. It explores the creative process through the work and life of such artists as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo. Using the creative process of artists and translating it to personal growth is genius.

Throughout Becoming a Life Change Artist, Mandell and Jordan, share accounts of people, just like you and I, who have overcome adversity to achieve their goals, whether it was going back to school, switching careers, or choosing to stay home and care for their children. Interspersed with this are the stories of successful artists and how they used the creative process to complete some of the finest paintings and sculptures in the canon of art history.

Not only will you learn about the creative process of artists, but you’ll also learn the specific skills involved to make your change real. And with plenty of exercises after each chapter to get you thinking, this book keeps you involved in your own creative process.

Finally, my favorite part of the book happens to fall at the end, in the appendix. There you’ll find some pretty amazing resources including the Creativity Calculator, where you can test your own creative skills and learn which part of your process could be improved. Plus, the Preparation Activities appendix provides a ready-made list of creativity-enhancing triggers.

It looks like Becoming a Life Change Artist will be my go-to creative companion for the next year, as I get ready for big changes in my own life.

  • How can you creatively reinvent you life?
Filed Under: Books, Creativity Techniques, Inspiration

End of the Year Musings

December 31, 2010 by Leave a Comment

As we close out this year and usher in a new one, I thought I’d do something I’ve never done before: a yearly wrap up!

This year has been a wonderful one here at Dose of Creativity, and a big thank you goes out to all of you who made that possible by reading, commenting and sharing.

Here are my favorite 5 posts from the year:

1. My Everyday Creative series in which I spent an entire year following The Creativity Book by Eric Maisel to see if I could really become an everyday creative person.

2. The Five {5} Creative Questions series. It was exciting to introduce you to an amazing group of women and learn their creative secrets.

3. I had the honor of reviewing Dawn Devries Sokol’s book Doodle Diary, which was a great delight. The book brought out my inner doodler and so much more.

4. After creating my first list of favorite creativity blogs last year, I wrote another one and included even more fabulous reads.

5. Finally, I created and went on my own creative retreat. I had such an inspiring time I am already planning my next one!

  • Stay tuned for a super-creative 2011
Filed Under: Creativity

Doodle Diary Not Just for Girls

September 23, 2010 by 1 Comment

Last week I introduced you to uber-creative Dawn Devries Sokol and this week I want you to meet her latest book, Doodle Diary: Art Journaling for Girls. I am a twitter follower of Dawn’s and when I saw this book was being released, I begged for a review copy. I guess I just knew that with a title like that it would be good and fit right into the theme of my blog.

Anyway, after receiving the book, I giddily flipped through it and quickly realized that not only is this book not just for girls (women of all ages will love it too!) but also it is the kind of book I wish I had had when I was growing up.

The introduction features a host of how-tos for getting started doodling, as well as tips for using the book and getting the most out of it. My favorite part includes a statement about how mistakes often make better art! If only, I had read that as a young artist, I wouldn’t have had to learn it later in life, but I digress… Dawn also includes a list of tools, which include suggestions beyond a simple pencil. She mentions gel pens, sharpie pens, and crayons among others.

The rest of the book is filled with brightly colored and creatively laid out doodling prompts with plenty of extra space to well, just doodle. What I really like about the book is not only the emphasis on expanding creativity for girls but also the subtle messages of self-improvement aimed at a group that could probably use a boost of self-esteem.

With that said, I’d highly recommend this book to girls (of all ages) and even to boys. It’s an overall magical book that everyone will glean a bit of creativity and inspiration from.

  • Sample prompt: 5 Things That Make Me Happy. Now get doodling!
Filed Under: Books, Creativity Techniques, Imagination

It’s Our Blogaversary!

December 15, 2007 by Leave a Comment


(Image Graciously Provided by KAR)

Today is Dose of CREATIVITY‘s first birthday. I am happy to celebrate with all of my devoted readers, who have been super supportive these past 12 months.

To keep providing you with the content you crave, I’ve created a short (it’s less than 15 questions!) survey to help improve this blog in the upcoming year.

As a ‘thank you’ for completing the survey, I’ll email you a copy of Dose of CREATVITY’s Top 10 Creative Cures, including a never before posted bonus one.

  • The survey is now closed. Please email me comments and suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you!
Filed Under: Creativity

Blogtour Chat with Eric Maisel

April 27, 2007 by 3 Comments

I am excited to have Eric Maisel, as my special guest today. He will be answering questions about the relationship between Ten Zen Seconds and the creative process:

Can you use the incantations and this method for any special purposes?

EM: As I mentioned, folks are coming up with all kinds of special uses. One that I especially like is the idea of “book-ending” a period of work, say your morning writing stint or painting stint, by using “I am completely stopping” to ready yourself, center yourself, and stop your mind chatter,and then using “I return with strength” when you’re done so that you return to “the rest of life” with energy and power. Usually we aren’t this mindful in demarcating our activities—and life feels very different when we do.

How do the incantations support the the creative process?

EM: Primarily by reminding a creative person that potential is just potential and that if you don’t completely stop, quiet your mind, announce your intention to create, feel equal to the upcoming challenge, take actual action in the service of your creating, and adopt the stance of a meaning-maker, someone who knows that she has a voice and that what she is about to say potentially matters, she will do precious little creating. Each of the incantations supports a piece of this “stopping and doing the work” process.

How would you address those that say centering is counterproductive to the creative process?

EM: There is a tremendous amount of “artist mythology” out there. Productive artists do a ton of work, they don’t wait for inspiration, and because they want to work for hours on end they have to master their inclination to run from the work when it becomes difficult, which it will at some point every day. It takes a centered presence to stay put like that, diving into the darkness of mystery and returning with poems, paintings, and symphonies, not an anxious, scattered presence. I would say that it is almost completely a piece of unfortunate mythology that centering harms artists—when they aren’t centered, they typically fall apart, grow depressed and self-destructive, and do poorer work.

Is there a way to experience this process in ‘real time’?

EM: By trying it out! But my web master Ron Wheatley has also designed a slide show at the Ten Zen Seconds site (http://www.tenzenseconds.com/) that you can use to learn and experience the incantations. The slides that name the twelve incantations are beautiful images provided by the painter Ruth Yasharpour and each slide stays in place for ten seconds. So you can attune your breathing to the slide and really practice the method. The slide show is available at http://www.tenzenseconds.com/test_photo_slide.html

  • Try practicing the ten zen seconds incantations.
Filed Under: Ten Zen Seconds

Introduction to Ten Zen Seconds

April 24, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Interview with Eric Maisel

What is Ten Zen Seconds all about?

EM: It’s actually a very simple but powerful technique for reducing your stress, getting yourself centered, and reminding yourself about how you want to live your life. It can even serve as a complete cognitive, emotional, and existential self-help program built on the single idea of “dropping a useful thought into a deep breath.” You use a deep breath, five seconds on the inhale and five seconds on the exhale, as a container for important thoughts that aim you in the right direction in life—I describe twelve of these thoughts in the book—and you begin to employ this breathing-and-thinking technique that I call incanting as the primary way to keep yourself on track.

Where did this idea come from?

EM: It comes from two primary sources, cognitive and positive psychology from the West and breath awareness and mindfulness techniques from the East. I’d been working with creative and performing artists for more than twenty years as a therapist and creativity coach and wanted to find a quick, simple technique that would help them deal with the challenges they regularly face—resistance to creating, performance anxiety, negative self-talk about a lack of talent or a lack of connections, stress over a boring day job or competing in the art marketplace, and so on. Because I have a background in both Western and Eastern ideas, it began to dawn on me that deep breathing, which is one of the best ways to reduce stress and alter thinking, could be used as a cognitive tool if I found just the right phrases to accompany the deep breathing. This started me on a hunt for the most effective phrases that I could find and eventually I landed on twelve of them that I called incantations, each of which serves a different and important purpose.

Which phrases did you settle on?

EM: The following twelve. I think that folks will intuitively get the point of each one (though some of the incantations, like “I expect nothing,” tend to need a little explaining). Naturally each incantation is explained in detail in the book and there are lots of personal reports, so readers get a good sense of how different people interpret and make use of the incantations. Here are the twelve (the parentheses show how the phrase gets“divided up” between the inhale and the exhale:

1. (I am completely) (stopping)
2. (I expect) (nothing)
3. (I am) (doing my work)
4. (I trust) (my resources)
5. (I feel) (supported)
6. (I embrace) (this moment)
7. (I am free) (of the past)
8. (I make) (my meaning)
9. (I am open) (to joy)
10. (I am equal) (to this challenge)
11. (I am) (taking action)
12. (I return) (with strength)

A small note: the third incantation functions differently from the other eleven, in that you name something specific each time you use it, for example “I am writing my novel” or “I am paying the bills.” This helps you bring mindful awareness to each of your activities throughout the day.

  • Please join me on Friday, when Eric answers questions about using this method during the creative process.
Filed Under: Books, Ten Zen Seconds

Are You Using Your Whole Brain?

February 18, 2007 by 2 Comments

whole new mindI attended a library sponsored book discussion on Dan Pink’s latest book A Whole New Mind thinking it would motivate me to read the book. Well, I certainly didn’t need the motivation. Pink’s book reads in a breezy style and is full of thought provoking ideas.

The book is based on 3 questions that organizations and individuals need to ask themselves in the new economy:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

These questions lead into his main arguments based on Asia, Automation, and Abundance, claiming that in order to flourish in an age of abundance, we must enhance our creative thinking skills that can’t be outsourced overseas or done by a computer.

The skills are as follows:

Not just for function but also DESIGN. It’s no longer sufficient to create a product, a service, an experience, or a lifestyle that’s merely functional. Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.

Not just for argument but also STORY. When our lives are brimming with information and data, it’s not enough to marshal an effective argument. Someone somewhere will inevitably track down a counterpoint to rebut your point. The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability to fashion a compelling narrative.

Not just focus but also SYMPHONY. Much of the Industrial and Informational ages required focus and specialization. But as white-collar work gets routed to Asia and reduced to software, there’s a new premium on the opposite aptitude: putting the pieces together, or what I call Symphony. What’s in greatest demand today isn’t analysis but synthesis – seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.

Not just logic but also EMPATHY. The capacity for logical thought is one of the things that makes us human. But in a world of ubiquitous information and advanced analytic tools, logic alone won’t do. What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.

Not just seriousness but also PLAY. Ample evidence points to the enormous health and professional benefits of laughter, lightheartedness, games, and humor. There is a time to be serious, of course. But too much sobriety can be bad for your career and worse your well-being. In the Conceptual Age, in work and in life, we all need to play .

Not just accumulation but also MEANING. We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.

  • Which one of these can you add to your work?
Filed Under: Books, Business Creativity, Creative Economy
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