Speaking Part 2 · PeopleIn the May–Aug 2026 forecast
Describe a Creative Person You Admire
In short
“Describe a Creative Person You Admire” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Creative Person You Admire. You should say:
- •Who this person is
- •How you know them
- •What creative things they do
- •And explain why you think they are creative
Band 9 model answer
The creative person I'd like to describe is my friend Nabila, who I met in my first year of university. Officially she was studying business like the rest of us, but everyone knew her as the girl who drew — she's an illustrator, and these days it's actually become her full-time career, which still amazes me.
We got to know each other because we sat together in a statistics lecture, and I noticed that the margins of her notebook were full of these tiny, incredibly detailed cartoons of the lecturer, the students, even the broken projector. They weren't mean-spirited at all — they were affectionate and observant, and they captured the atmosphere of that room better than any photograph could have.
In terms of what she does, she illustrates children's books now, and she also runs a little online shop selling prints. But what strikes me as genuinely creative isn't the drawing skill itself — plenty of people can draw well. It's the way she thinks. She has this habit of connecting things nobody else would connect. For one book about a shy child, she drew the whole story from knee height, because that's the level a small child actually sees the world from. The publisher told her no one had ever pitched that before.
I've also watched her deal with creative block, which taught me a lot. She doesn't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. When she's stuck, she deliberately does something completely unrelated — cooking, long bus rides, rearranging her room — and treats ideas as something you go out and collect rather than something that falls from the sky. She always carries a scruffy little notebook, and I've seen her stop mid-conversation to scribble down a phrase or a shape.
The reason I admire her, beyond the talent, is her courage. Turning down a stable corporate job to draw pictures for a living horrified her parents at first, and she spent two very lean years proving it could work. She backed her own imagination when nobody else would, and I find that braver than most things people call brave.
Being around her has honestly changed how I work too. She convinced me that creativity isn't a mysterious gift reserved for artists — it's mostly curiosity plus the nerve to try things that might fail. I still can't draw a convincing cat, but I approach problems differently because of her, and I think that's the mark of a truly creative person: they make everyone around them a little more imaginative.
Make it your own: three angles
A friend who turned art into a career
Gives you two stories in one — their creative work and their brave career choice — plus rich Part 3 links about creative jobs and risk.
A relative who is creative in everyday life
Creativity doesn't have to mean art: a grandmother who invents recipes or a father who fixes things ingeniously is a fresh, memorable choice.
A creative professional you follow
A designer, filmmaker or architect works, but ground it personally — explain what their work makes you feel or do, not just their achievements.
What the examiner is listening for
Don't just assert that the person is creative — prove it with one concrete example of how they think differently (the knee-height illustration in the model does this job). Examiners reward specific, visual detail here, and the final bullet is your chance to define creativity in your own words, which pushes you into band 8–9 abstract language.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you think of yourself as a creative person?
- Did you enjoy art classes at school?
- Do you prefer paintings or photographs?
- Is creativity important in your job or studies?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Do you think creativity can be taught?
The raw instinct varies from person to person, but the habits of creativity can definitely be taught — questioning assumptions, combining unrelated ideas, tolerating failure. Schools tend to teach the opposite, honestly, because there's always one right answer. So I'd say you can't install imagination, but you can absolutely stop suffocating it, and that looks a lot like teaching.
Why do some people think creativity is declining in modern society?
Partly because convenience removes the need for it — when every answer is a search away, people improvise less. There's also the argument that algorithms feed us more of what we already like, which narrows the strange collisions of ideas creativity depends on. I'm not fully convinced, though; I think creativity is shifting into new forms rather than disappearing.
Are creative jobs valued fairly in your country?
Culturally they're admired but economically they're undervalued, which is an odd combination. Everyone consumes music, design and film daily, yet parents still panic when a child wants to make those things for a living. It's improving as digital platforms let creative people earn independently, but the assumption that art is a hobby rather than a profession dies slowly.
Is creativity more important for children or for adults?
It matters differently. For children it's how they learn at all — play is basically research. For adults it's what separates routine work from valuable work, especially now that machines handle the repetitive parts. If anything, adults need it more urgently, because children are naturally creative and adults have usually had it trained out of them.
How does technology affect people's creativity?
It lowers the barriers dramatically — a teenager with a phone can now shoot a film, compose music, or publish illustrations to a global audience. The risk is that endless scrolling replaces the boredom that used to push people to make things. So technology hands us extraordinary tools; whether we create with them or just consume through them is a personal choice.
Do you think artists should follow public taste or their own vision?
Their own vision, primarily — art that only chases the market becomes indistinguishable from advertising. But I don't romanticise starving for principle either; the great creators usually find a bridge between what excites them and what audiences can connect with. Ignoring the audience entirely is often less integrity and more poor communication.
In what ways can ordinary jobs involve creativity?
Almost any job has moments where the standard procedure doesn't fit — a teacher rephrasing an idea five ways, a nurse calming a frightened patient, a shopkeeper arranging a window. Creativity there means noticing that the usual approach isn't working and inventing a better one. It rarely gets called creativity, but it's exactly the same mental move an artist makes.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to think outside the box | to approach a problem in an original, unconventional way |
| imaginative | full of new and original ideas |
| creative block | a period when a creative person cannot produce new ideas |
| inspiration strikes | a good idea arrives suddenly |
| observant | quick to notice details other people miss |
| to pitch an idea | to present an idea to someone hoping they will accept it |
| a leap of faith | a risky decision made while trusting it will work out |
| ingenious | cleverly original and inventive |
| to back yourself | to trust and act on your own ability or judgement |
| the mark of (something) | a sign or defining feature of a quality |
More cue cards
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