Students imitate their own success and they imitate their peers. In art, this amounts to what I call, another one of those artworks. Limitations can be a good thing to motivate creativity. Requirements in an assignment narrow the realm in which one is allowed to operate, making it easier to focus on a problem or an issue. We can find some useful teaching strategies by looking at how artists generate ideas.
Many artists use a device called changing habits of work .
An artist may be feeling like everything is becoming redundant and familiar. In order to force a new idea to the surface, an artist might reverse the order of work, change the medium, change the scale, forbid a certain common component in the work, and so on. These are limitations to foster creative thinking. In creative teaching, assignment limitations provide a way to change the student's habits of work. When a student isn't allowed to repeat a familiar pathway into the work, additional creative effort is expended to succeed.