[Tutorial] How to Get Those Creative Juices Flowing

[Midday-Mew]

Having trouble thinking up new ideas? Feeling uninspired for your next art piece? Hit a creative block while working on your story or poem? Fear not! Maybe what you need is an exercise in creativity. Here's a creativity exercise that works for me when I'm in a creative rut. I do this exercise enough times and then I start getting really creative, it gets those creative juices flowing.

What you need: eraser, erasable graphite pencil, paper, pen (if doing traditional). Or just use Photoshop, GIMP, or your art program of choice (as long as it isn't MS Paint--you need to use something that allows you to have multiple layers, or in the case of Illustrator/Flash (or some other vector-based art program), multiple vector objects).

Step 1: First, with a pencil, do a bunch of hodgepodge doodling on a piece of paper. Don't lift your pencil, just basically make a doodle that seems to make no sense in what you're drawing. Basically a scribble-like mesh of different shapes, is what it should look like when you've finished doodling. You just want to make a long interconnecting line that changes directions and intersects with itself often, until you fill up a big area with the line.

An example of what I'm talking about is this example of what I call a "scribble doodle":

Spoiler

(Did this in Photoshop since I know how to do this sort of thing in that program. You just need to lower the layer opacity of your little "scribble doodle" layer and then make a new layer above it for the next step. Or if you're using a vector-based art program such as Flash/Illustrator, just make your scribble-doodle object(s), group them, then reduce the opacity of that scribble doodle using whatever means your program of choice permits. Illustrator has a Transparency panel that you can use to do this. Not sure about Flash.)

Step 2: Next, you look and stare at that strange scribble until you "see" an object/character/whatever in the lines. When you see it, trace what you see with a pen. Then erase the remaining pencil lines that you didn't trace. You're free to add additional lines and details. You may even end up discovering a design you really, really love, like I did once when I somehow managed to turn one of these into a doodle of a cute little dog.

Here's what I was able to see in my "scribble doodle" example above, you may "see" something different than I did, and that's normal and completely okay!

Spoiler

(As I did this in Photoshop, on a new layer with 100% layer opacity I traced what I "saw", in this case it was a skillet, a burrito, and a pouch. In a vector-based program, you'd do this as new objects higher in the stack order. If your object is behind the partially-transparent lines, when you start drawing in the 100-percent-opacity lines and you make the first line, do the Bring to Front command. In Illustrator, you go to Object > Arrange > Bring to Front and continue drawing. I'm not sure about Flash or other vector-based programs.)

Step 3: Repeat this exercise as many times as you need to. You'll know you're done when you feel your mind "shift" into a different mode of thinking. This is basically tricking your brain into using a different hemisphere than it is used to using--in other words, you're forcing your brain to switch to its creative artistic side, or the right side of the brain (the left side is for reading, writing, arithmetic, and logic/reasoning).

Hope this helps! Feel free to post in this thread what you came up with!