Where do ideas come from?


This is a question dreaded by anyone doing creative work, as usually, the first truthful answer is, "I don't know".
I have also previously said that looking for ideas is like asking your brain please and it eventually comes up with the goods...Which in short just means, keep asking questions and eventually answers, or at least parts or answers will come.

The reason I like writing about drawing, art, and creativity, in general, is that even for creative people it often feels like a mystery. Sometimes you're fired up and producing work like crazy, and other times you're wracked with self-doubt and frozen in fear, unable to produce anything.

One of the things I keep returning to in my thoughts on how to do good work (or any work at all) is motivation. You can read all the tips and tricks you want on productivity, but motivation trumps all. I try and motivate myself all the time, but in reality, I feel fickle. Motivation comes and goes and there's not a great deal I have found to control or understand that. There is however one truth that I know, and it's so simple, that it is easy to dismiss.

Work comes from work...

It sounds like one of those terrible motivational phrases, and maybe it is. But it is true. Ask a writer how to get better at writing they say...write! Ask a drawer how to get better at drawing the say...draw! It sounds like lazy advice but it's true. Of course, there is a lot more to it than that and for the actual beginner, you will need a heap more. Let me explain.

Ideas come from ideas. Don't have any ideas, then you had better get some ideas.

Things don't come from nothing, ideas don't appear out of nowhere, although it can seem like that at times. Big ideas come out of small ideas. Big answers come from big questions, and big questions come from progressively smaller questions.

So if you're stuck on what to write, write anything. Stuck for what to draw, draw anything. Work comes from work, (big) ideas come from (small) ideas that are built on. Nothing comes from nothing.

Create the fertile environment for ideas to come, how do you create a fertile environment? Populate the environment with ideas...

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for reading...

Comments are always welcome. To subscribe via RSS, click here or sign up for my new publications' newsletter.

Popular Posts

Creating Screen tone effect in Photoshop

Image
Also known as zipatone, Ben-Day dots, halftones etc For this tutorial a basic knowledge of Photoshop, colour modes, resolution, history and layers pallete, copy and paste functions will help. It is often desirable to achieve screen tones for artwork for either practicality or for effect. What ever you need it for I am going to show you the most effective way to achieve this using Photoshop. If you can master this, then there is no need to track down real zipatone and fiddle around with cutting it up. The middle section on ‘creating dot patterns’ is fixed although how you create your grey areas and how you use the dot pattern is up to you. Firstly this tutorial has nothing to do with the halftone pattern in the Filter menu. In my mind this filter gives a poor, hard to control, and fuzzy result. Which is not suitable when you need real screen tones for something like screen printing. Creating greys First open the artwork you want to add screen tones to; Be sure that this a
Read more

Tangency

Image
The problem of contrast and tone . One of the major concerns when drawing comics or images is that of tone and contrast. This is especially true of B&W drawings but to a lesser degree with colour. It is often referred to as ‘tangency’. When you do not have tangency, the lines that you have drawn blend into one another an become hard to decipher. The image is basically flat and hard to read.  A/ This image doesn’t give us enough information; there is no contrast or line variation. B/ This is a little better, with some added line width, but still flat C/ This example is much better, there is line width, hatching and cross hatching, and areas of black. This helps us discern where the objects are sitting.  D/ This example uses screen dots to create a grey tone that gives us contrast. Notice how I’ve placed the black differently in this picture. The picture is a little flatter than ‘C’ but still works. This method could be used for stylistic purposes. E/ In this example I have gone too
Read more

Review of Sanford Prismacolour Non-photo blue pencils

Image
WARNING: Comic talk ahead! I wanted to write a short review of the 'non-photo' blue pencils I have been using lately. I'm doing this so that if you have to order these things through the mail or don't want to waste money trying and buying these things then hopefully this review will point you in the right direction. There are three pencils that I have come across. There are other types and brands, but these are the ones I have had experience with and I think may be the most commonly used in comics. 1-Sanford col-erase non-photo blue. (pictured) This pencil's lead is quite hard and hardly shows up on the paper. This is good if you only want faint marks as guidelines and not so much an actual finished drawing. There is an eraser on the end that actually works to a certain degree. Although it's really only for peace of mind as you don't need to erase the pencil after inking anyway. I found this pencil too light to do actual finished or rough outlined
Read more