The Creative Process in Graphic Art

Abstract

The visual arts have traditionally been treated as a major domain of creative activity and were the subject of some of the first empirical studies of creativity, such as Patrick’s seminal research (Patrick in Archives of Psychology 178:1–74, 1935; Journal of Psychology 4:35–73, 1937). In this chapter, the artistic creative process will be examined through: (1) interviews of professional artists, (2) observations of art students in real contexts, and (3) exercises proposed to art students to develop their creative process; the creative process will be examined with a particular attention paid to the factors involved in artistic creativity using the multivariate approach to creativity. This approach describes four main categories of factors: cognitive, conative, emotional, and environmental factors (Lubart et al. in Psychologie de la creativite. Armand Colin, Paris, 2015).