Whether you’re an artist or an engineer, everyone needs a little creative inspiration sometimes. As the Creative Content Specialist at Lucid, I’ve built my fair share of flowcharts and mind maps. Last week I realized that, despite using the editor every day, I still have a lot of features to explore. Curiosity ignited, I set out to create something new in Lucidchart.

The result? In an epic display of geekery, I recreated an impressionist masterpiece using diagramming software: 

This version of The Starry Night uses colored diagramming shapes found in the Lucidchart editor, duplicated and layered to create the effect of Van Gogh’s impressionist style.

Understandably, recreating famous paintings may not rank highly on your list of diagramming needs, but the fact that our flowchart software can reproduce an artistic masterpiece with any level of fidelity speaks volumes about the power of the Lucidchart editor.

Chances are that you, like me, have yet to experience the full range of Lucidchart’s functionality, so if you’re looking for creative inspiration to improve your diagrams, take some time to play around with these Lucidchart tools and features:

• Inserting diagrams within Google Docs
• Presenting diagrams with “presentation mode”
• Generating automated diagrams like UML sequence markup and ERD export to SQL
• Adding interactive elements with Hotspots and Layers
• Building wireframes with UX shape libraries
• Editing diagrams with five Lucidchart hacks

One last thought, inspired by Van Gogh

While doing background research on The Starry Night, I stumbled upon an interesting fact. Many people don’t know that The Starry Night was painted in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France. Despite his barred windows, Van Gogh looked outside his tiny room and painted the swirling skies beyond.

Like Van Gogh, if you find yourself discouraged with your work, ask yourself whether your focus is on the bars or the stars of the project. Are you hung up on roadblocks? Or can you take a minute to remind yourself why you started this work in the first place? Paint a mental image of the importance of your work, and visualize your ultimate goals (map them out in Lucidchart if you need to).

The result might be a masterpiece.