Idea Generation

I'm of the school of thought that everything is a skills, and almost everyone can learn almost any skill. And as an artist, this includes things like "creativity" and "imagination". Therefore, "creativity" should be seen as a skill like any other, and "inspiration" can be learned through the right methodology. In this section I'm focused on the search for tools, frameworks, and methods that allow for the generation of quality visual concepts. Included are general essays on the purposes of art, and reading annotations on relevant books, and sometimes excercises from those books or courses.

"Keys To Drawing with Imagination"
Annotations and Excercises #1

Book published in 2007.
Article published in 2022

(source for the book cover @openlibrary.org )

We tend to think of imagination and creativity as qualities that people have . But in reality these qualities show up only in action - as something you do.

I don't really remember when I decided to read this one. Perhaps it was in a blog post somewhere? I don't know. I've been trying to get through it since (I believe?) 2019. Maybe even further back. Definetly before the pandemic. I remember starting it with a lot of commitment, but I have gone through many stops-and-starts in that process. So much so that despite pouring many hours of practice into it.

I can't seem to get past chapter 1.

It's not that it is a boring book. On the contrary, I'd say it's one of most didactic art books I've seen. It's flexible, it's consice, and it's easy to read without being devoid of strong ideas. Somewhow thogh, it never got me in the 'flow' enough. One part of it could be because it is slightly disjointed, the sense of progression isn't clear (by which I mean there isn't one, is more of a "toolbox" type deal). Another part, I guess, might that be whenever I skimmed over the next chapters, which are mostly about obvervational drawing, they seemed less relevant as to what I was looking for (pure imagination drawing). I was tired of observational drawing.

I'm hoping now to get through it again and finally finish it (that is, do all the projects) this year (2022).

We'll see how it goes.

Why I'm reading this Book

Now it will mostly be for the sense of complition. I believe the most important ideas are in that first chapter: I was looking for an approach to ease the process of sketching from imagintion. This is a topic that I seldom find discussed in art instruction literature, because a lot of it is spent on meanderings about "(beret voice) what IS art, exactly?!" or endless prescriptive manuals of techqnique. This is the only "complete", serioust attempt at producing a material in this area of art instruction that I've come across (If you, reader, know of any others, drop me an email) , and hence my insistence in getting through to meet the requirements of the excercises as closely as possible.

That said, I do think I wasted a lot of time trying to follow along the book too closely. I'm more of a character and comic artist than a "coneptual" one, so the more abstract excercise (while interesting) are hard to made relevant intro the kind of skills I was trying to build.

This is the kind of thing I wanted to be able to do more.

In fact, one meta-lesson I'm taking from this experience is to be ruthless about finding applicability in learning projects . I think I have be more willing to cut through material that I'm already familiar with, and adapt the theory to the themes and generes I'm interested in.

Anyway, we learn by doing, and learning to learn is also a learning process. Right? (...) so, that's an extra lesson for the next art book I get through.

But let's get through this art book first...

The Structure of the Book

The book contains 8 chapters, plus an introduction and glossary.

-➤The book is littered with illustration examples. As a small comment on that: Dodson's drawings were very charming, and specially appropriate for the topic due to their rawness and humble quality. It seems a bit strange then to have other artists featured with more "refined" projects in this, I think this was a section that could have been cut.. there's also a metric conversion chart in the second page, which is nice.

-➤ The glossary is pretty useless (and slightly annoying in the way it comes up with new terms for things that already have equivalent in the art world, ex: "Intensifying" when "Caricaturing" is a lot more of a useful descriptor, that would point the student on where to go). From here, I would only highlight these verbs: obscuring, intensifying, literalizing, distortion. There's other wordy concepts in it, such as "wobble" to call the hand-made quality of an inperfect quality, but then I ask... do you need a new word for that? and to put it on a glossary? I don't know. It doesn't jivve with me, I guess...

-➤The introduction is great on its own, and sums up the takeaway lesson of the book: creativity is a process. imagination is a skill. therefore they can be learned, coaxed and nourished. The way to do this, proposed by the book, is approaching drawing is by using drawing as an "algorithmic" process. This process is based on using verbs that are repeatedly aplied to an initial ideas, kind of similarly to Richard Serra's Verb List(but less encompasing than that project). There's also a passing remark on the ambiguity of the word "imagination" used in the title. Pointing out that "imagination" could be drawing imaginative drawings in the sense of surreal or dreamlike things. Or it could be "imagination" in the "industry sense" of creating an image without references as base.

Imaginative drawings therefore are born not out of "divine inspiration", but repeated explorations. Ideas can be made and furthermore, they can be improved upon. Dumb ideas can be made into compeling, rich ideas. But dumb ideas are dumb, but they are worthy for being starting points for sharper ideas.

click for full size

These are the chapters:

1. Doodling and Noodling
2.Drawing a New Reality
3.Stretching the Truth
4.Visualizing Ideas
5.Storytelling
6.Exploring Pattern
7.Mining Culture
8.Exploring Themes

This post will focus on the first chapter.

"Just lines", and the first transformative operation, "texturing"

To create, we shift through "doodle" vs "noodle" modes of thinking, that is thinking in terms of focused refinement and moments of bold sponteniaty. One is akin to pure improv, the other a careful red-marking of lines in scripts (althought the lines tend to blur when we're doing subjects we handle really well). Noodling is pretty ardous, but also straight-forward, making getting truly "out-there" ideas though it much more difficult. There's no "school" or method for it, though this books' excercises and things like improv excercises suggest ways to cultivate that sense of sponteniaty.

The first excercise the book suggests is to just "take a line on a walk" and have it complete a shape, twisting it and turning it so it creates other shapes. Then you fill those shapes with "operations", which I refered here as "texturing" (this took me back to the days of mspaint and playing with the timebucket, in a similar manner... the heights of artistic creation).

In this page, I was exploring the variaties of "line".
This was also the birth of the the worm bois (*fl).

This page continues the excercises, and I tried to push the worm bois idea further.

Here you can see I'm already starting to get ansty about the abstractness of the excercise. So I began searching for ways to use organic lines to create rocks, varying textures to create variety, and extrusion to create maps.

Now I'm trying to use animal/human features instead of just textures.

This marks the start of "composite" texturing. Here I realize this has potential to be abstract art on its own right. (*fl)

Some more doodle operations copied from the book: these introduce the ideas of repetition and pattern.

The text suggests "shuning the inner critic" in this stage. While I think there's a point to this, I feel it glosses over how important the analytics of drawing is to crucial to make a good picture. I think it's more accurate to say that a constant shift between conscious-unconscious states is the best practice. And this has to apply before, during, and after composing a picture.

An attempt to compose a "picture" this way.

Straightforward attempts from the book's suggestions.

Going for a "90s anime rune" vibe here.

Organic-ish doodles (cut wood?)

Meaningful Transformations

After the abstraction quality of the above excercises, we start to get into more figurative doodles. The book even makes the distinction of how some "operations" are more "transformative" on the initial doodle. In my mind, I refer to these as "meaningful transformations" or "non-texturizing operations". These are usually things you see in proper composition books or design principles: extrude, perspective, shading, repetition, repetition with variation, repetition with variation under a sense of order (could be "building", could also be geometric designs like islamic tiling or fractals),

Extrusion property on some squares and an oval + scale figures + hatch shading = make a city.

Extrusion on a more straight-forward architecture way.

Various easy ways to do rocks. Required doing some IRL studies first, though. (*fl)

About "building doodles": "Just keep adding bricks until you've got something. This helps you appreciate a fundamental paradox about creativity: You don't always know what you're doing until you've done it. This is why we place so much emphasis on process"

Selected building block doodles from before with the operation "shading" added.

Characters, Silhuettes, and Animations

In this section I compile all the excercises I did that are specifically about creating figures, or that the end results coalesed into that (silhuetes and stippling).

This is the "silhuette" excercise. As you draw you reduce the space for the other figures. It's actually very similar to the logic of the "fill the space" line game from above.

Some of these have a particular theme: dancers, superheroes, legs/kicks, birds, hoodie'd figures.

The book suggests testing filing the figures/backdrops and see what happens. It feels more "readable" but I'm not sure I dig the aesthetic as much as the lines alone, though.

Testing with color! finally.

The humble stick figure, in an animation mindset. This is powerful as a way to develop visual-thinking, but definetly hard to: 1) polish it 2) pick ideas that could be their own thing.n

This goes into the pointilism from bellow, but I think the direction quality warranted it goes in this section. I'm very happy with this page.

Failed experiments

Circles... this was a hybrid of an excercie form the naimator's guide, wherein it suggests doing circles as a way to practice visual vocabulary. i hope that the circles i do as (pulso) practice could be a way of organizing the doodles on the page, and even learn to interesting doodles themeselve.s however besides the man face and the squiggle within squiggles im not sure it works too much. to work, it seems the doodles need to be adapted to a circle-composition or cirlce-cropping

Pixel framing... after sucessive folding (technique developed fom origami) i was hoping this grid could help make patterns. hoever it is just os boring... and imrpecises... pherhaps this could be repeated on a bigger paper. the idea of using it to plan decorative facades pherhaps could work, but again, it just isnt doable with the little details.

pointillism... is the worst. I don't know how the author thought this counted as a "doodle". But here we are. I hate these a lot. They just look like trash. Pherhaps the only exception s the lil' fox.

Landscapes... I really want to be the kind of artists that cojures up worlds from nothing in squick sketches. But it seems just trying to do that isn't the way. I think in the future I'll try to apply some constraints, or abstractions to make this do-able.

even on failed drawings you discover cool things: here the flash light created a cool effect on the biro's ink.

Conclusion

The maing take-aways are:

1- Get drawing, and ideas will develop.
2-As a collary, ideas don't come if you don't draw. And drawing more gets more ideas.
3-An algorithmic, pattern-like approach can be useful: vary shadows, vary shapes, vary lines, etc. You can produce endless variations on 1 basic idea.
4-The basics of composition aid here. Lines, shapes, dots, repetition, the abstract qualitites of design, knowing how to employ these is crucial.
5-Adding textures and shading are "basic operations" but there's other's transformations that may be more significant:
5.1- building
5.2- shading
5.3- extruding
5.4- iterate
6- To think of drawing/paingint as something without an end-point. It is a continous search over topics that caught your particular attention as an artist.