I didn't read all of the replies, but did anyone suggest getting her to try a new medium -- one that is unusually difficult to controle, like cake icings, encaustics, or found art. Loosing controle forces you to work around and come up with creative solutions. My other suggestion is to work inside extremely tight constraints. I like to do historical reproductions from periods too far back for the preservation to be good. So you have to try 16 different things before you get a result that ends up actually looking like the models, and you can rarely use a single model alone (but that's just me). Constraints force you to be creative because when most elements are fixed, you have to use those leftover elements pretty intensely!
