Saturday, November 15, 2008

Banking Ideas

Man, I love Fall. There's something about the cool wind that refills my creative juices! I was able to have a major brainstorming session the other day. (The result was three pages of thumbnail sketches-most of which I'd like to see taken to the level of portfolio addition.) I consider these kinds of pages my "idea banks", and refer to them when I have dry spells. I'm able to continue working and most times it will knock out my artist's block, allowing even better ideas to flow through.Case in point: I've had a picture book story written for a while now. It's been critiqued twice and edited and drafted at least ten times. The next step was to create the dummy. Easy, right? Uh, no. As soon as the opportunity came to actually transform my own words into my own characters, my brain seized up and said, "No way, Jose!" Two months ago this happened! I've had many false starts since then. I drew and discarded countless faces and bodies. However, after I created my idea bank, the creativity dam busted wide open and all kinds of goofy guys came flowing out. Here's just one page of character studies:I'm still working on them, but I feel so much better about the whole project and cannot wait to get the dummy done.

I should have known to do something like this. I mean, it's the same thing I used to tell my students when they couldn't get started on their compositions. "Just write. Write every word that comes to mind. Don't focus, just take the word vomit and spread it all over your page. Something good will come of it." Take my own advice, why don't I? hahaha!

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous10:23 AM

    I love the concept of an "idea bank" - I think my problem is that I like to focus too much on the rough sketch, which causes a lot of starts and stop in the flow of ideas... congestion of the brain, I guess.

    Thanks for your comment on my blog the other day - I like the marathon vs. sprint analogy, and I think that applies to so many things that are worthwhile.

    You know, I still remember that awesome frog and bubbles sketch you did for IF a long time ago... those sketches reminded me of that. :-)

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