#5 Creating: Creative Activities...Program Series

That’s right, gang—it’s time for another review of a book in the Creative Activities …Program series! We’re now on #5 Creating, and I had high hopes for this one; the idea of being creative and creating anything is super exciting to me. But I gotta give it to you straight right off the bat: This reads like an ununified collection of ho-hum projects rejected from the other books in the series. They might as well have just called this “Making Stuff with Stuff!” (Maybe I’ll use that title for my future creativity book.) But let’s try to find a shred of entertainment value in it anyway!

#5 Creating

Creating is not the full title here. Like the other books, it has a subtitle: Adventures in New Things. And the more that I stare at this subtitle, the less I understand it, especially considering I’ve already read the content. But let’s come back to this and review the three sections:

Creating with Materials
Creating with Sound
Creating with Words

Okay, see, now I gotta go back to that subtitle. What about that says “Adventures”? What about that says “New Things”? Why is a creativity book called Creating so lacking in creativity with these section titles? I’m going to get dinged by Yoast SEO for using “creating” so much so I must cease and desist with this current train of thought.

Creating with Materials

This intro image might be the most interesting thing in the section. What happened here in the desert? What’s that stuff in the bottom right corner—some broken stone slabs and a rifle? I truly can’t figure it out. I think a crime has been committed though!

We open with drawing and painting projects that you can easily find via Pinterest search today, only Pinterest will probably make them seem worth the effort. The book suggests doing coin rubbings with crayons, making rainbow scratch paper, painting pebbles, slathering your drawings with turpentine and wax, making fingerpaint and inkblots, painting shadows… That last one may seem cool and creepy at first blush but it ain’t. There’s no new ground broken here.

What might that child see in her inkblot? A portrait of the gaunt spectral horror lurking beside her, perhaps?

Then we move on to the more sculptural arts. Readers are advised to

Create jewelry out of paper clips and rocks
Make flowers from buttons and wire
Construct metal wall hangings using flat-head screws and aluminum foil
Make clay impressions and reliefs
“Grow” styrofoam flowers out of environmentally unfriendly egg cartons
Decorate hollow eggs (That’s how you get the carton for the styrofoam flower box!)

It’s not clear what that little clown-like creep is or how to make it or what it has to do with the styrofoam flower box

You know—all the crafts that no one actually wants to keep. Speaking of such, we of course get not one but two macaroni crafts! If those projects were any closer to the beginning of the book, it’d be too obvious that this was not a book worth reading.

There are some projects of reasonable merit, like

Sculpting clay pots (Classic!)
Making potato prints (Add some fabric paint and some tye-dye T-shirts and there’s the perfect slumber party project!)
Building a “rockscape” (I’m biased; I secretly long to create dioramas and dollhouses out of found objects for a living.)

But we don’t care about reasonable projects—we want the nutty ones. And there are two that stand out for being bonkers:

Creating a nail porcupine (You get a walkthrough on how to make a spider, too, but the porcupines are truly weird.)

Playing with meat trays—yes, the styrofoam beneath the bleeding packaged meat at the grocery store

Where does the first monkey picture come in? Is it really so obvious how to incorporate the egg carton bits into the drawing and why? Ugh I’m annoyed now

Before Nintendo Switch, we had only meat trays

This is 1974, goddammit! That means our kids can craft with whatever they want! So sit ‘n spin, salmonella!

Creating with Dynamite

I mean, I wish. Think of all the things you can make!

The initial projects in “Creating with Sounds” are a lot like the more experimental ones in #4 Performing. Youngsters are urged to simply futz with objects to see what noises they make and play rhythm and music games. But then, they graduate to being able to MacGuyver a musical instrument out of any damn thing. Specifically, they’re taught to make maracas, castanets, tambourines, drums, flutes, whistles, banjos, guitars, pianos, and even a harp.

This all seems pretty impressive—until you get a closer look at what some of these instruments are made of. For example, an old garden hose for a fife (that has your name on it!).

Under your nose with an ol’ rubber hose, Jason

But hold onto your meat trays; folks—here are the instructions for rhythm sticks/drum sticks that I just need to share verbatim:

“Get two bones from short ribs of beef. Save them from dinner or ask for them from a restaurant. Clean off all the meat. Scrub them with a brush. Put them in the sun to dry. Let them dry thoroughly. Cup one bone in one hand. Hit it with the bone in the other hand.”

Gosh, what a time to be alive. I mean, alive before all the salmonella and stuff inevitably kills you and all.

But like #4 Performing, this section of #5 Creating is most interesting when it features illustrations that suggest drug use, like the following out-of-context scenes:

They’re supposed to be blowing on their bottles but I think they’ve just lost control over their lives

How to hide that 4/20 is your favorite holiday from your landlord (Even that caterpillar is in on the action!)

“Let’s all go smoke a joint on the hill!”

To conclude this section, take a look at these instructions for a “musical game” where you make a lot of noise and humiliate your best friends:

Creating with Words

When I was an assistant to a creative writer during a summer-long art program for teens in 2005, we were constantly doing cool stuff with words, like making altered books and exploring different types of poems. Unfortunately, this book does not elicit the same feelings. It actually makes creating with words kind of suck—even making up a new secret alphabet. How does one mess that up?!

You get some mention of different poems (haikus and non-dirty limericks). But mostly, you’re dealing with picture riddles, spelling hopscotch (on a lifesize chalk-drawn typewriter keyboard) and races, word ladders and triangles… It’s all very English class-y and boring. That’s why we have to again rely on images and snippets of text with little context to up the entertainment factor. Behold:

!!!!!??!?! Why is this so dark??? The visual of the weeping bedridden bee especially gets me

Whoever this artist is is really a master of nightmarish imagery

In conclusion, the final project urges kids to create “your own world,” with a “pretend home,” all those crazy musical instruments, and a secret diary. I’ll be honest: Even after enduring all this creative wackiness, I say sign me up—I’d rather deal with nail porcupines than all the current nightmares today’s reality offers!