I have the visions of what I want and usually lose myself in those for a while. Then I make them somehow. I’ve always been heavily drawn to comics and high fantasy art so a lot of what I create is very fantastic characters. I spend some time in complete and total lala land thinking about who the character is and what they do and why.
And then I try and put them in some form other than my imagination. Sometimes it works, sometimes…
-L
I personally try to keep a sketchbook + mini voice recorder (the kind with a usb plugin that will convert the recordings to wav files automatically) + a digital camera on hand anywhere I go… and have access to a scanner at my apartment… that way I’m set to record ideas as they come and get them in to a physical form as quickly as possible, and am not limited to being able to draw them, or having to write them down in sketch book as a dialogue… still do that quite a bit though… Having all of that sorta stuff on you can get you lots of ideas while they are fresh, before they fade… In college I used to only use sketch books, and I tried to capture dreams in them to base paintings on them… If I’d had the mini recorder back then I could have done a much better job since I can only write so fast, and it’s sometimes easier to state ideas in vocal format to get ideas across than it is to sit down and start doodling and stuff as the doodling causes you to jump from the creative to the technical side of your brain, which can easily wipe out afterthoughst of dreams in less than a half a minute… as technical ideas start creeping in to the dream ideas/thoughts/etc.
for me there are 2 main ways how i get ideas,
The first is watching TV and Movies I see something in a movie; the lion king for example and I imagine things; [i]my current project is trying to make my dog into a CG Disney style charecter.
[/i]The other way is I have very intersting conversations with my flatmate (who is not an artist) where we create these hypothetical situations and then try and make them as screwed up as possible, It sounds stupid but i tend to get my best original ideas from this.
oh, and if they fail I have really wacked dreams.
I think creative people suffer from some form of psychosis
tis the key. Buy expose, great source of inspiration, watch futuristic movies (Mad Max, star wars, lotr, AI are great examples to boost your inspiration).
i take my inspiration also from watching videos or visiting websites. www.augensound.de is always a good inspiration for me, because there is so much variation of art (3D, paintings, photography etc…)
I have no ‘process’. They just happen. Sometimes daily. Sometimes weekly, and sometimes not at all. :shrug:
i keep banging my head against my microwave until i get an idea or two.
or until i see pretty colors. either way, fun fun peanut butter lamp post dinner place mat fun!
mostly, ideas just come to me. mainly because i’m on a different mental plane then everyone else and can see through everyone [enabling me to see your thoughts float away].
How far can your ‘borrowing’ go before it’s considered ‘stealing’? I don’t copy anyone, unless for practice, but I’m curious.
Good question.
Borrowing, stealing, … experience, etc… however you want to put it represent a small fraction of the creative process. Consider it like steroids. It can boost the process but lacks the longevity to step it up. The downside of such dependency is long term drought of ideas.
The key to any creative process is to shut down reception from the outside world and listen and communicate to your self. Now, this is not about good or bad art, nor about high or low quality, but it’s about a creative process that its outcome is representative of YOU. I second the fellow who recommended to go out experience a lot of things, since that could help not only the visual memory, but will certainly enhance your recognition of potential ideas.
Don’t take me wrong, shutting down your reception could take fraction of a second, or hours. The key is to connect to your self.
lol…I don’t know why I feel like a Yoga instructor 
I don’t really have any specifc process, because it completely depends on my idea.
Usually when I come up with an idea, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with it. This completely varies from idea to idea though. For instance, sometimes I’ll want to convey a certain emotion, other times I’ll want to convey movement, other times I’ll want to just play with colors or shapes. The only real advice I could give is just go with your gut instinct. Also, never try and mimic another style just because you think it looks cool or something. Often times when an artist tries to do this, they end up being unsatisfied with the results, often because they over work the image. That’s not to say it’s bad to experiment with different styles, because different styles can work better for some situations than others.
Usually a little worm squidges itself through my ears into my brain and starts talkinmg to me… but sometimes I just egt hit with something on the back of the head, that really works well, gives you the time to process whilst lying twitching on the floor.
technique is for when we make our ideas imo. My ideas are dreams and things I have/do to keep myself busy, things I’d rather see instead of reality and general ‘ambient noise’ that left a noteable impression on me.
Music always inspires me to draw and write, but I have to be careful.I once tried to make a romantic (digital) painting while playing the sountrack of Mortal Combat in the background. My work turned out to be… quite interesting 
The traditional walk in the park also works good for me 
Inspiration and ideas are not the same thing. Sometimes I’m feeling pretty inspired to create, but my ideas are crap!
I get most of my good ideas either brainstorming with other people (creative teamwork is great) or in my awakening slumber after a good night’s sleep! Like Ali said, shut down reception and connect to your inner self.
I have found that my mind is often fixed on the medium I use and I feel that it sort of constrains the creative process. I have been trying to brake free from this and to do that I try to get inspiration from things in other mediums (What I mean is that if I want to make an Orc(or anything) in 3d and start looking at other 3d images for inspiration my image often becomes uncreative because this has been done so often and looks much more traditional rather than creative).
I have there for started to look into poetry and such from other times (yehh I know, sounds heavy and I know a lot of poetry is hard to read (Specially if its not in your native language)) but if you use study notes and the some of the help there is available you should have your mind filled with new original Ideas (worked for me at least).
I have mostly been studying the English romantic period at the University and it is very inspirational to read the texts the authors made. And also to see that from some of the more famous poems, Artists have created artwork and you could have 5 different versions showing the same place/person
Write every idea down. No matter how lame or incongruous.
I think a major difference between a professional creative artist and the average learning artist is professionals know they will forget!!
I’ve been exploring my own process recently; a valuable resource has been Robert Genn’s book “The painter’s keys”. (www.painterskeys.com: this guy has a free newsletter that is absolutely fantastic as well.)
Nonetheless, I think you need a system that allows you to adjust your process to the problem at hand. Having no system tends to reinforce established patterns. Having a rigid step-by-step process always ends up with really stale crap. The goal of my system is to always be “in the zone”. Instead of “thinking”, you create, and then analyze for the next obvious idea. “Let the work tell you what it needs”, so to speak.
A valuable resource is a list of the different visual aspects you find interesting. You can start with the basic ones, contrast, lost and found line, pattern, etc., but just keep a list around. If you ever get stuck, just pick one obvious thing off the list that you want to establish better. Work it in a thumbnail if the primary work is too far along. Thumbnails are nice, because they’re small, and can only take like 10 minutes to work. And you can bash away at them.
The key here is avoiding “thinking”, where you’re spacing out and wondering how to make things better. If you don’t know what to do, you’re not going to find out by thinking about it.
Of course, if you’re like me, running out of steam happens with more frequency then I’d like to admit. So burn it, delete the crap, and move on. (Or move it to a folder for “crap” and forget about your mistakes.) The whole process is liberating, once you can get past being too “precious” about what you’re doing.
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