Too Much Inspiration

[legomaestro]

God I need to find a better way to title these things, but what the hell, I'll just get started. This is a 1st World Art Problem if there ever was one, but it's there, and it's annoying.


I wanted to buy a guitar on ebay so I took a 2 hour train ride to some relatively remote township to get the thing. It was suburbia as you'd imagine it: Manicured lawns, hop-scotch chalk on the sidewalks and more cobblestone than actual tarmac. Nice place.

After getting the cheap but awesome new guitar for 25 bucks (love the thing. Steel strings. They hurt but sound so nice) I was walking home when I saw this:



And an image immediately popped into my head. About a month later after coming up from air I finally drew it, but it's pretty much what I saw when I saw it:






The funny thing is I'd played a game the weekend before seeing this stick, at a rave party with a couple of friends. They gave me drawings that looked like something and challeneged me to draw something else from them (tv screen to a face, a toothbrush to an aeroplane, that sort of thing.)


This sort of thing, where simple shapes and scribbles can turn into drawings is a huge thing for me. I love it when I'm in the zone and inspired and is an asset for churning out characters and thumbnails and just putting ideas down. I know it is. I should be stoked about this.

But the problem is I feel too charged with ideas, really. I can work with almost anything and that murders my focus.

I wish I were more systematic about how I worked with ideas, on my projects and the like. Heck, drawing the actual image itself took so long because I just felt stagnant and choked. The odd thing is, I see these things in patterns and random features and instead of feeling inspired there's this amazing sense of boredom and the mundane that sinks onto me.

Like 'Well, it's not THAT great of an idea to draw anyways. Surely there must be something better or more useful for you to do. Just wait.'

I suppose my perspective is the thing that's the problem here. I should focus on the positivity of it all and just draw and draw and draw, but I keep on freezing because I'm thinking 'Is this really it? And what about completing actual projects? And who the hell picks up sticks and photographs them and draws them? That's such a bother. I should do something else.'


I have no idea if I could get my idea across here. Anyhoo, I just felt like sharing it for some reason.  Also. Workshop idea maybe? Meh.

[Coryn]

I've definitely seen people doing this exact thing. Taking things and making drawings for them. So I don't think it's all that uncommon, it's just a different way of channeling creativity.

Honestly, it reminds me of being a kid. Sticks in the yard becoming legendary swords in the mind's eye and that sort of thing. Simple imagination running wild. So I don't think it's necessary to think of it as a bad thing. You just need to work on your organization. Try sorting these things out into a pile of things you can use, and a pile of things you can't. That way if you don't have a use for something at the moment, you won't feel like it's gone to waste, because you will still have a record of it. Might just be a good way to help you learn to let go.

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

I mean

Spoiler

I've drawn some pretty random things. I had a Figure Drawing professor who said he didn't care what we did in class when our work was as long as we were drawing. And he said "I don't care if you just want to draw a dinosaur". I remember having a College Algebra professor who said something funny when a student said she didn't understand exactly what X (squared) represented. So she gave the obvious response, "x is a variable, it could be anything, it could be 2 squared, it could be elephant squared".

One of my friends recently told me she still has a copy of my illustration of an elephant squared.

Spoiler

A lot of professional artists have this same experience, but typically these people are so goal oriented that they make it work towards their portfolio by considering it a "study". So these professional artists decide they want to draw an elephant cube, but they also want to brush up on their shading and stylization skills. So if you're concerned about wasting time or resources when you have these kinds of big goals you can always apply these sources of inspiration towards your main goals by using them to develop skills that might be necessary.

[legomaestro]

Elephant squared haha.

Pawn chan is total win.

And I see what you mean. I'll try to look at it more positively.

@Coryn documentation for later it is. I've done this while making songs randomly before so yeah why not.

[Suuper-san]

Whoops didn't see this previously :P
time to ramble :P

I can work with almost anything and that murders my focus.

I think I hit this same barrier a couple of months ago. well it's the opposite of a barrier really :P
Really it means that you don't need to train your mind any more, for the moment, and you need to be working on your art skill with all these brimming ideas. All the while, jotting down new ideas, plots, characters and inspirational phrases along the way, so when you finally have the skill you want, you've got these great ideas waiting for you. Out of all my sketches I produce monthly , I save about 10% of my best most favourite ones to finish later when I have a better skill, and in the meanwhile, I focus on the 20% most boring and inaccurate ones to boost my art skill and test methods out on.

Like 'Well, it's not THAT great of an idea to draw anyways. Surely there must be something better or more useful for you to do. Just wait.'

Both yes and no.
As you know my WIP processing takes unfinished boring sketches and adds details and finishes them off. For the most part I've taken very similar sketches and taken them down different paths to completion, just by changing a few details or a pose. So a bad idea can be developed into a good idea. Just take most anime premises and describe the plot in 10 or 20 words - that's probably what the initial idea sounded like to the writer. But they developed it into a full blown great story. But yes you will have good days and bad days, and sometimes you will produce really awesome ideas that blow your normal ideas out of the water. But waiting for it to happen isn't worth it when you can learn to take ANY idea and make it good. That's my thesis - brute force.

You know, I almost haven't drawn a single new casual sketch since I started working on my WIPs a year ago. I almost don't need them any more, I can just come up with new ones on a theme, develop them and I've got a nice set of themed characters or whatever.

I wish I were more systematic about how I worked with ideas, on my projects and the like.

I have tried out multiple methods for developing ideas (not exhaustively by any means), and pretty much ANY method works to some degree. To be "systematic", you really have to sort your drawings into categories or folders, and have stages of development, pretty much like what I do now.I recommend having a list/schedule of each project you will do, in order, and in that order only. It's keeping me on track for sure, and the regimes are certainly very structured ways of staying on track.

I suppose my perspective is the thing that's the problem here. I should focus on the positivity of it all and just draw and draw and draw, but I keep on freezing because I'm thinking 'Is this really it? And what about completing actual projects? And who the hell picks up sticks and photographs them and draws them? That's such a bother. I should do something else.'

At the end of the day, productivity is key, and it is certainly better than no productivity for sure. It doesn't matter what your inspiration is as long as it works. You should totally be positive about it.

(did you make this post before you posted about the pipe cleaner figure? I might be doubling up on my rambling)

[Canegi99]

Read and feel encouraged