![]() ![]() Now that you have your elements, play around with how they interact with one another. If you’re working with paper, resist the urge to paste things down as you go. The point of a mood board is that it gives you a limited space, forcing you to narrow in on a specific idea. Spread out all your sources (or line up all the tabs in your web browser), and with your idea clearly in mind, start narrowing it down, keeping only the things that intuitively speak to you. Once you’ve gathered your source material, it’s time for a round of editing. The research process, she explained, can help you regularly review “the things that you keep in your brain or record…because otherwise, they’re just in this abyss.” This stage is a chance to get out of your head and let inspiration guide you.Įcheveste also goes through the materials she already has, including the photos on her phone, which become a part of her mood boards often. “It leads me down rabbit holes that I otherwise wouldn’t necessarily go down,” Echeveste noted. While researching online, let your instincts guide you. If you’re going to libraries and bookstores, don’t be afraid of checking out or buying more books and sources than you think you need. If you’re dealing with paper sources, Echeveste advises keeping (or in the case of a library book, photocopying) the whole page instead of just a single element while researching-you don’t know at this stage what exactly you’ll need, and there’s no need to make that decision right away. ![]() “Dig deep for that film that you saw, or dig deeper for an artist that you really like,” she advised. Echeveste often looks for references she’s seen before, maybe only in passing, but that are stuck in her mind. But don’t be afraid to indulge in this stage of the process and spend time seeking out images and source material. “Doing a mood board and being really specific about your references is helpful,” she said. This balancing act of thinking big and narrowing it down helps her find her true focus. Whether she’s making a physical mood board or a digital one (with InDesign), Echeveste does her research online or at a local library, to cull together as much inspiring material as possible. Here, we share some insights from Echeveste on how to get started on your own mood board. You can think of a mood board as a low-stakes creative project, requiring little time and few supplies, through which you can think through and focus your ideas before you execute them. “I was looking to focus the next art project,” she explained, and thought: “I’ll just make a mood board for the type of work I want to do.” Her own weaving practice emerged from making a mood board during one such experience. In practice, a mood board is meant to help brainstorm and plan creative projects, while vision boards are aspirational tools used to plot out personal or professional goals.Įcheveste explained that making an effective mood board can also be helpful for artists going through a creative rut. Given the ubiquity of mood and vision boards, the two terms are often used interchangeably, Echeveste explained, but they’re actually quite different. Post-war fashion and graphic designers used mood boards as a way to relay their ideas to large creative teams.īrooklyn-based artist Stephanie Echeveste teaches mood board and vision board workshops through her company, Distill Creative. Pinterest’s 2010 arrival made mood-boarding as easy as clicking on any image or inspirational nugget of the internet to “pin it” onto a virtual “board.”Īnd while they might not have called them “mood boards,” artists and other creatives have been using this method for decades-collaging together pictures, small objects, and ephemera to convey or capture a “mood,” idea, or theme. When mood boards reached peak popularity in the early 2000s, they were branded as a lifestyle tool for everyone from college-bound teens planning out their dorm rooms to foodies and mommy bloggers.
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