How to Use Pinterest to Reveal Your Unique Creative Voice

If, like me, you're a ‘pinaholic’, why not get productive by using Pinterest to explore ideas for your art? Here's how to use it to explore ideas for your creative work and hone your unique voice at the same time.

Why Pinterest is the ideal tool for refining your creative voice

Pinterest is probably not the first place you think of going when you’re trying to hone your creative voice. You might even feel that time spent on there is wasting time rather than engaging in a vital stage of your creative process.

Yet, it is the most powerful visual search engine. And its engine constantly brings to your attention images that share common traits with what you’ve pinned before. This makes it the ideal tool for discovering your unfiltered preferences.

Being intentional in your use of Pinterest

The process of pinning is a very instinctive one: You see something, you choose to save it, then you decide how to categorise it. There’s very little censorship going on - especially if you use private boards to collect images for your creative projects.

As you go through this process, you’re building up a library of ideas that you can refer back to at any time. And the way that Pinterest displays the image really helps to give you an overview of how your ideas are related.

To make the most of Pinterest as a tool to uncover these unconscious connections, you need to get intentional about how you use it.

Using Pinterest to uncover themes

The instinctive nature of pinning is really helpful in terms of connecting with our natural, unfiltered responses. But once we’ve built up our library, we need to analyse what we’ve been doing.

To do this, spend some time looking at how images across different boards relate to each other. What do they have in common? Is there a theme which ties them together? Do you need to re-categorise any of your pins to get a stronger sense of this relationship?

Screenshot of bird-themed art Pinterest board

Birds - my board for bird-themed art on Pinterest

Creating boards for recurring motifs

Here's another way to use Pinterest boards to strengthen your creative voice. Look for motifs, symbols and colours that recur often in your work. Then start boards for those.

Every time you spot a new image to pin to these boards, you'll be reinforcing these motifs, symbols and colours in your subconscious. And, gradually they'll take on a more pivotal role in your work.

I have boards for 'whimsical heads’, birds, hands – which have all cropped up repeatedly in my art. I've also got a board called 'a dash of yellow'. Yellow is what I call a 'surprise colour'. It shows up frequently in my work without me being conscious of ever having put it there!

Creating these kind of boards is a way of consciously acknowledging our personal language of symbols, colours and themes. This helps strengthen our artistic identity or creative voice. And, at the same time, we store up a great collection of imagery for inclusion in future work. Double whammy!

Screenshot of "Dash of Yellow" art ideas Pinterest board

Dash of Yellow - my ‘surprise colour’ art Pinterest Board

Pinterest for expanding your ideas

Pinterest boards are also a great way to explore new ideas we'd like to experiment with in our art. For example, I started a board called 'Intriguing Figures' when I was focussing on making figurative art. Through this board, I discovered lots of great art by artists I'd never heard of. And was inspired to try working with figures in a way I hadn’t previously thought of.

Pinterest for Writers

Pinterest is not just useful for visual artists. It's also great for writers. You can use it to gather images for the backstory to your book:

Physical appearance of your characters
Clothes they wear
Homes they live in
Workplace

Even that dark alley where the fight scene takes place…

Likewise, you can gather images of landscapes or interiors as a moodboard for your poetry, or colours that evoke a certain mood.

Or what about details? The kind of lock that was so easily picked. The pattern on the carpet the heroine noticed before she fainted. The ring the child's mother wore on a chain around her neck…