Idea Generation Task

If you haven’t read my previous two blog posts on idea generation, I would highly recommend doing so before giving this a try because it’ll help a ton! In this post I’m going to go over a task that I recently gave to students to help them to develop their ideas. Please have a go at this yourself too and send me your results on social media or through email as I’d love to see them!

The task that I created for the students was essentially a way for them to be able to come up with ideas for the most random things which you might not initially think of, and to also have fun with it.

The first thing that I asked the students to do, was to think of what their three favourite things in life are, it could be anything, it just needed to be three things that they absolutely love and geek out about. For example mine were sharks, coffee and Halloween. From those three words I asked them to come up with around ten associated words for each, below is my example.

From these three lists I then asked the students to design a character clearly representing each of the three lists. They had an option to do one of the following character types: a zombie apocalypse survivor, a NPC trader, or a mage. I encouraged them to keep developing their idea as they went, noticing what was and wasn’t working and constantly improving it or making changes to experiment with ideas. I thought it would be a good way to develop their critical thinking skills and push various iterations. Now to introduce you to my character….

I chose to go with a zombie apocalypse survivor (obviously!), and I decided to write a short sentence about him to form a basis for my idea, which included all of the 3 keywords (something I also encouraged the students to do). My sentence was ‘ A zombie apocalypse survivor who worked in a coffee shop (coffee) in an aquarium (sharks) when the zombie apocalypse happened around Halloween (Halloween).

Starting something like this can always be quite difficult, you can spend a lot of time overthinking ideas and thinking about what might work, but in the end, thinking won’t really solve anything, the most important thing is to just get something down. This was also quite time sensitive for me because I needed to prepare this as a demonstration for the students, so I really did have to just get started. Don’t be afraid to start with the obvious either, that’s what I do, it’s a really good way to start to visualise your idea and kickstart the flow of new ideas. So I started out with some pretty obvious sketches….

I found it quite easy to portray the words coffee and shark through the use of coffee cup armor and a shark fin strapped to his back, but Halloween was a little harder, and initially all I could think of was some Halloween face paint. Then my ideas started flowing and I tried to think about it more as a game character, asking myself a lot of questions and not being afraid to push my concepts, which is when I decided to give him coffee cups strapped to a belt, which he could consume for health and a big plastic Halloween axe prop. I didn’t think that the axe looked great so I pushed it even further and gave him a ridiculously oversized Halloween plastic knife costume prop.

I felt like it was getting a lot better but I felt like I’d come up with a really interesting concept for the coffee and wanted to do the same in terms of the shark and Halloween elements. I explored the idea of having a shark plush (from the aquarium gift shop of course) strapped to his back, but the way that I drew it on wasn’t working great. I thought it might work better going up his back, which seemed to work much better. If you’ve followed me for a while you’ll probably know that I love drawing pumpkins, so the idea to put a pumpkin on his head as some kind of helmet just naturally evolved and got the concept to the kind of level I wanted to use as an example.

I didn’t want to stop developing the character there and I’m sure I’ll explore it more in the future, but I think it’s a good example of sometimes using what you’re already inspired by and that just getting started can be a really good process to get your ideas flowing no matter what you’re working on. I did decide to quickly render this guy digitally though, so here’s the finished result!

Thanks for reading guys, and please send me your concepts if you do decide to do this task!