Your art is extremely inspiring! At the moment, I'm having a bit of an art block (traditional art) in regards of my classwork. How do you usually go through your idea -> planning -> sketching process?
Hi @godspuppet, Thank you so much and sorry for taking so long with this response because it is a very complex topic so…buckle up:
What really helps me is having a place where I save all the images that inspire me. I have an inspiration blog on tumblr and an inspiration pinterest. You should constantly feed your brain with new exciting things to look at, the things that you like the most will stick in your brain and might come out at point when you are trying to come up with an idea. It’s a good idea to not only look at the images you like but also copy them. And not like copy them and then post it as your own work but copy as a study. The copying shouldn’t be just mechanical work where you draw with your favourite song on in the background, your brain should be really focused trying to understand what makes this artwork so great, what makes you love it, what sort of techniques and themes you could apply to your work? Now you looked at your inspiration blogs but you still can’t come up with a good idea, a thing that helps me is cooking or going for a walk with some good music on to let my mind wonder and fantasise about things. This is where all the practical work you did (the images you remembered and copied) will help you manifest an idea. It’s good when you have certain themes that help you narrow down your ideas. For example for Huevember I’m focusing on supernatural beings, fashion and trying out different art techniques - these are my idea frames. I won’t be drawing a simple human, the human shape has to distorted in a way or should represent something fictional. I go to my fashion blogs and look at outfits I like. The recent skeleton boy was a combination of me loving child skeletons (well skeleton in general) and transparent raincoats, the pumpkin idea came along because my color was orange and Halloween was recently. The egg man was originally going to be a transparent yellow blob. When I thought of the color yellow that was the image I got in my head, I had to put that blob into a pair of pants. I also wanted to draw those funky shoes. Making him into an egg was an accidental thing, it wasn’t planned, I came up with it while painting the sketch and I’m really happy I kept that accidental idea. And it’s really impossible to know what triggered that idea but it’s obviously something from past experiences of looking at eggs and enjoying how they look xD
(PS.: if tumblr is shrinking this image, just do the open image in a new tab)I have more Huevember sketches but they are all scattered around different notebooks and random pieces of paper.Now once you have a general idea of what you want (or even if you don’t), it’s important to learn to conquer that empty page. The beginning is always the hardest part (unless you really have that clear vision but even then you might not have the skill to complete it). Just start sketching, anything at all. The sketches can be messy and boring but after some time, an accidental sketch can feed a whole line of new ideas, but you will never make that ‘happy accident’ if you don’t try making something. Creativity is a super complex topic, sorry if I went too long explaining things xD I have to note that creativity is also a struggle for me, but the more I present my mind with interesting content and practice the easier it is to come up with interesting ideas. It was much more difficult in the past.
