Exploring Artistic Inspiration with Oblique Strategies

Over the past fifteen weeks, we created art using prompt cards from the Oblique Strategies card deck.

By The Art Toolkit Team

A hand holds out a small black box with golden lettering, Oblique Strategies, with art supplies and drawings strewn across the hardwood floor in the background.

Over the past fifteen weeks, we created art using prompt cards from the Oblique Strategies card deck.

Oblique Strategies is a unique deck of cards with prompts intended to break creative blocks and encourage lateral thinking. In the 1970s, artist Peter Schmidt and musician Brian Eno came up with a deck’s worth of imaginative lines that offered solutions to the blocks that they encountered in their daily, creative lives. This autumn and winter, we shared these thought-provoking tidbits in our newsletter and across our social media platforms as an invitation to explore artistic inspiration in them.

1. Use an unacceptable color

A sketch of a blue lemon next to a real-life yellow lemon.

2. Tidy up

A watercolor palette with mixed paints, a white sponge, a small rectangular container, and a paintbrush filled with water are arranged on a purple background. A card reads "Tidy up."

3. Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

A prompt card atop a piece of watercolor paper painted a rich purple with a creme colored paper poking in the frame.

4. Use filters

Three differently-colored paintings of the same lighthouse lined up on a purple backdrop.

5. What to increase? What to reduce?

An open sketchbook with a blackberry leaf sketch with varying line weight, a prompt card, Pilot Parallel Pen, and a real leaf subject.

6. Look at the order in which you do things

An artist holds up two paintings, one drawn with pen then watercolor and the other painted then contoured with pen.

7. Once the search is in progress, something will be found

8. Decorate, decorate

A prompt card surrounded by a colorfully painted frame with a watercolor palette and paintbrush beside it.

9. Only a part, not the whole

A prompt card and a small paintbrush lie atop two water landscapes, one from a distance and one zoomed in.

10. Slow preparation..Fast execution

Splattered paint next to a paint palette with a purple mix in the lid.

11. Go outside. Shut the door

An Art Toolkit held up next to a doorknob.

12. Turn it upside down

A painting of an evergreen forest next to a Demi Palette, turned sideways.

13. Simple subtraction

Monochromatic penguins painted using distinct negative space.

14. Work at a different speed

A sketch of a vibrant orange bird with gestural paint and precise pen outlines.

15. Reverse

A sketchbook with a lemon, lemon sketch, paint brush, and two prompt cards (Use and unacceptable colour and Reverse) rests on the floor with palettes, props, and sketches around it.

Big thanks to Maria Coryell-Martin and Nakaia Macomber-Millman for lending their artistic talent to these prompts and to Peter and Brian for coming up with such an interesting deck of cards—they really made us think!