Idea Generation Tips - Part 2
Last week I went over the first lecture that I did for my students on idea generation, I spoke a lot about where to get inspiration from and this week I’m going to talk about how to develop your inspirations into ideas, and then also putting all of that into practice along with offering some tips for creating your ideas. I was also going to go over the task that I gave the students and the example I did, but I think I’m going to save that for next week as it’s probably going to be fairly long!
Idea Generation Tips
Brainstorming and lists - these are both a great way to get all of your ideas down in one place through buzz words. Whether those words represent a physical thing, a feeling, a colour or aesthetic etc. they can all act as building blocks for your final idea. Word association is a good catalyst to add into this too as it’ll help expand your ideas without too much overthinking.
One thing that I always do and always have done since my college days is to make notes on my work, whether thats digital or in a sketchbook, I consistently add notes to areas of improvement so that I know what to work on next time.
If you really are stuck, do things that force you out of your comfort zone, do the opposite of what you normally do, yes you will feel uncomfortable, but you’re very likely to make happy accidents. For example, if you normally draw digitally, get your sketchbook and pencils out and use those, or if you draw a lot of detail, try drawing a couple of random blobs and create character heads from those.
It’s also extremely important to remember that idea generation and idea development are skills, skills that can be built on and improved. Some people will be further along with this skill than others, so don’t take it to heart, just keep working at it and it’s a skill you will consistently improve.
It’s quite common that a lot of artists will try to draw something new or try a new idea and instantly feel stuck, which usually results in them quite quickly giving up. This is generally a case of just not knowing, you don’t have the knowledge required to create what you’re envisioning, which can easily be fixed by simply doing some more research and studies.
The Creation
Before you start any drawing, try to create a basis for your idea (going back to things like the brainstorms and lists, a short sentence about your idea can also be really useful).
Just get started and stop overthinking it, motivation comes from getting started, not external sources.
As the Fine Art saying goes ‘Design with your arm and draw with your wrist’. This means using bigger, looser shapes and gestures for your overall idea and then refining and adding details when the general idea and composition are correct.
Forcing yourself to make mistakes is essential too, you need to figure out what doesn’t work as well as what does work. You’re going to create bad drawings, everyone does, but try to start seeing it more as a positive rather than a negative.
Think outside of the box - this is one of those things that people say and it is a really difficult thing to make sense of and know how to put into practice. One way I recommend thinking outside of the box is to put two things together that wouldn’t generally be seen together. It might work, and it might not, but you can guarantee that you’ll probably get an idea from it.
Next week I’ll go over the task that I gave the students and also took part in myself, hopefully you guys will be able to give it a go too and really explore your idea generation process!