Ideation Process: Part 1

Cre­at­ing art­work is a won­der­ful gift, a plea­sure that I cher­ish and indulge in on a daily basis because it is both my favourite past time and because it is also my profession.

For myself (and undoubt­edly many of you read­ing this) there is no com­pa­ra­ble expe­ri­ence of div­ing sty­lus first into an alter­nate real­ity, indulging our coolest ideas and danc­ing the tango with plain old creativity.

How­ever, speak to any artist and I’m sure they’ll vouch for the fact that it is also an activ­ity that can drive many of us to the heights of frus­tra­tion. This is espe­cially true if we don’t have bat­tle tested pro­ce­dures and processes that we can rely on when inspi­ra­tion and a loose brush alone aren’t enough.

This topic delves into the very heart of the cre­ative process, the ini­tial flow­ing of ideas onto paper when we feel our ideas are strongest and also gives insight into work flows you can rely on when your art direc­tor comes back to you and says “give me some­thing more!”

Now, before we begin, I’d like to point out that even though these ideas are eas­ily incor­po­rated into casual or fine art mak­ing, my focus (and my expe­ri­ence) is that of a com­mer­cial artist — specif­i­cally con­cept art and as such this is the audi­ence my writ­ing will prob­a­bly speak most clearly to.

With all that out of the way, let’s get started!

Before you sketch…

If you know me, then you’ll know what I am going to begin with – do your research!

Whether you know or under­stand the sub­ject mat­ter inti­mately or not, you need to fill your con­scious­ness with new infor­ma­tion on a con­sis­tent basis in order to pro­vide fresh ideas/reminders for your images or risk grow­ing stale and cre­at­ing highly deriv­a­tive art.

What does this mean in a prac­ti­cal sense? Well, in today’s age of blogs, online arti­cles, image archives, forums and the like this essen­tially means jump­ing on the Inter­net and using your favourite search engine to source out some visu­als to kick start your engine.  Some of my favourites are listed below – it cer­tainly isn’t exhaus­tive, but these are typ­i­cally all I need to find good reference:

Online:

1. Google Images
2. Flickr
3. Art Ref­er­ence Sites (eg. www.FineArt.sk)
4. Stock Photo Sites
5. Pose Mani­acs

Phys­i­cal:

1. Live Mod­els
2. Books (eg. Buddy Scalera books/CDs, Spe­cific Sub­ject Books)
3. Trav­el­ling Overseas
4. Art Gal­leries
5. Muse­ums
6. Good Archi­tec­ture.

If you don’t have the Inter­net (in which case I’m not entirely sure how you are read­ing this in the first place!) then it means a lit­tle more leg work, going to your local library, pick­ing up a news­pa­per, mag­a­zine, trade jour­nal or watch­ing a movie, shoot­ing your own image ref­er­ences and stock pil­ing your men­tal arse­nal from there is a good start.

Whichever resources you choose to draw upon, just make sure you use it as inspi­ra­tion only and don’t pla­gia­rise the work. That would be unscrupu­lous and does not help your skill level grow; indeed it will more likely lower your con­fi­dence in your own abil­i­ties as you begin to rely more and more on this as a cre­ative crutch.

Thumb­nail Sketching

So you’re given your brief, you expe­ri­ence that irrev­o­ca­ble moment in which you are deliv­ered your design task and the synapses start fir­ing off instantly and a myr­iad of images start flash­ing through your mind.

Now what?

Well, the best thing to do is to start get­ting your ideas into visual form whether that be on paper or dig­i­tally, don’t talk about it with other peo­ple, we’re not pro­fes­sors of lit­er­a­ture, there’s plenty of time for dis­cus­sion later just get your pen mov­ing and don’t stop.

Should you warm up I hear you say? Should I prac­tice some­thing to get the blood flow­ing through my fin­gers you ask?

Nope, don’t sweat it.

You know what? The first few will prob­a­bly be really bad, just accept it and have the con­fi­dence to know that the more lit­tle sketches you do, the bet­ter they will be as you go along.

It is impor­tant to under­stand that how it looks right now is of lit­tle impor­tance at this early stage, they are rep­re­sen­ta­tional short­hand ideas for your­self that will lead to more devel­oped ideas down the track. It helps to imag­ine your­self as a doc­u­men­tary agent, try­ing to cap­ture the images that are flash­ing before your mind’s eye.

As the name would sug­gest, thumb­nail sketches (or sim­ply ‘thumb­nails’) are very small scrib­bles, designed to be fast, putting down what you feel, emp­ty­ing your mind of your cur­rent thoughts so that they may be replaced by more ideas and by jot­ting these ideas in quick suc­ces­sion you are aid­ing the veloc­ity of the process.

If you are won­der­ing what sort of sketch­ing you should use to doc­u­ment your ideas or how much is too much or too lit­tle, then you’re most likely not alone. The answer is that you should use as much infor­ma­tion as you need, but as lit­tle as pos­si­ble, if you feel you can sketch a char­ac­ter using just plain old line work, then so be it, if you need to put in some value to bring out the form then do that. There is no sin­gle answer for every­one and so you should doc­u­ment your ideas using what you feel comfortable.

Don’t be afraid to go crazy at this stage, every thought is fair game to be plot­ted on your sheet, in fact some thumbs will sim­ply be filler used to dirty up the page.  I don’t know about you, but a blank sheet star­ing me in the face is intim­i­dat­ing, its say­ing to me ‘I dare you to dirty me up…oh no, actu­ally I dou­ble dare ya!’

To which I usu­ally reply by throw­ing down a few inco­her­ent lines to get past that ini­tial “Clean Sheet Syn­drome”. Once that page has been vio­lated with scrib­bles, it is no longer as impos­ing to draw on and a men­tal bar­rier is bro­ken allow­ing your sketches to flow more freely.

As you can see from many of the sketch images I have posted, I am not coy about cre­at­ing “dirty” marks on the page. Whether I work dig­i­tally or tra­di­tion­ally, I think that a bit of dirt and tex­ture helps give life to an image. It is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for dig­i­tal artists in my opin­ion to incor­po­rate some tex­ture into their work, to break that com­puter illus­trated look that so many dig­i­tal art begin­ners seem to fall into.

Dig­i­tally, I tend to work with very sim­ple brushes, or brushes that come stan­dard with the pro­gram I use which is Pho­to­shop – mostly a com­bi­na­tion of soft air brushes and harder edged air brushes with reduced spac­ing so as to mimic con­tin­uos tone. I tend to use these brushes as a high tech ver­sion of a pen­cil or a block of chalk, typ­i­cally start­ing by lay­ing large areas of tone onto the can­vas before cut­ting back into the shapes with white.

Check out this video I recorded for myself to see what I mean:

In order to facil­i­tate this quick process I mainly use my sty­lus, the space­bar to grab the can­vas and the “alt” key to color pick the tone’s I want from pre­vi­ous laid down strokes. When you get use to it, this is a very quick method of work­ing and allows you to put your ideas down very quickly.

You may notice on the above illus­tra­tion that there are some images that look very sim­i­lar to each other – herein lies another of dig­i­tal media’s advan­tages, the abil­ity to cre­ate vari­a­tions sim­ply by using the mar­quee tool and cre­at­ing a new layer using the exist­ing illus­trated layer as the source. This will then allow you illus­trate over this image, cre­at­ing a vari­a­tion side by side to the orig­i­nal, the beau­ti­ful thing is that it frees up your inhi­bi­tion to exper­i­ment and can be done infinitely.

With the image, I cre­ated a rel­a­tively small can­vas on screen in Pho­to­shop – roughly 400px by 400px at 72 dpi. Now, this is a fairly small size, nowhere near print qual­ity, but because this is the dig­i­tal medium I am using, that does not really affect me as I am able to upscale at any time and with a bit of clean up can come up with some­thing print­able in a short period of time.

Another prac­ti­cal­ity is that the can­vas does not chew mem­ory, at such a minis­cule size your brush strokes can be as free and wild and quick as you like with no dan­ger of lag. Of course with today’s increas­ingly fast com­put­ers, this tends to be less and less of an issue, but I still like to start off at a small scale so as to resist the temp­ta­tion to jump into the details immediately.

Try dif­fer­ent mediums

One other point I wanted to men­tion, was that I tend to like using lots of dif­fer­ent medi­ums, dif­fer­ent medi­ums require dif­fer­ent work­flows and stim­u­lates the cre­ative juices in vary­ing ways allow­ing new ideas to flow for­ward. So exper­i­ment! Go out there and try oils, char­coal, pen­cil, pen, what­ever. Cre­ate and be happy =)

Okay, this sums up the first part of this tuto­r­ial les­son, hope­fully you get some­thing out of it. Any ques­tions, leave a com­ment here and I’ll get back to you =)

Keep your eye out for the sec­ond part tomorrow =)

Cheers,

Daz