Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains. Every creative writer gets asked the question at least once at a social event with non-writers: “Where do you get your ideas?”
To the asker, writing is a dark art, full of mysteries only the initiated understand. To the writer—as Neil Gaiman tells us in an essay on his website—the question misses the point and misjudges the writer’s task. “Ideas aren’t the hard bit,” he says. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
Sometimes hardest of all is the “simply sitting down” and writing when there’s nothing, no ideas. Gaiman, feeling that he owed his daughter’s classmates a thoughtful, detailed answer, responded with the below, which we’ve put into list form. Ideas come from daydreaming. Tell us, readers, do you find any of Gaiman’s idea sources helpful? Related Content: 6 Pieces of Fan Art That Are Better Than the Original. If 37 percent of the Internet is porn, then the other 63 percent must be people complaining about stuff.
A movie that disappointed; a game that's taking too long to come out; George Lucas. Well, sometimes the companies or creators will actually address their fans and say, "You think you could do better than us? " And sometimes the fans will answer back, "Um, actually, yeah. " #6. Star Wars Fan Remaster Looks Better Than the Real Thing Unless you still have a working VCR, the only way to watch the original, theatrical versions of Star Wars is buying the out-of-print 2006 DVD box set, which insultingly comes with the original movies as mere bonus features on a separate disk (meaning, you had to pay for the Special Editions to get them).
But what else are fans supposed to do? How the Fans Made It Better: A fan from the U.K. named Adywan did that and much more. ESBR Preview ESBR PreviewHmm. ANHR Visual Comparison ... making the lasers hit the right places ... #5. How the Fans Made Them Better: #4. Defining Your Artistic Style. Learning to paint (or draw) well takes years of practice, and on the way it’s not uncommon to get stuck in a rut where you feel like you’re no longer improving, but you still aren’t happy with where you’re at.
While some might throw in the towel here and declare that they’re just “not talented enough” there are a few relatively simple steps to break out of your box and figure out a new approach that can further develop your skills. Analyze Art Before you can really make stylistic choices about your own work, you need to be able to know which assumptions you (and others) are making when you’re painting. Draw a very rough sketch of a person. You’ll probably end up with some kind of oval for a head, and a series of oblong roundish things outlining the rest of the body.
Picasso used square heads; cartoon characters sometimes don’t even have a real head (think Spongebob), but we still think of them as recognizably anthropomorphic. Setting Constraints Setting Good Constraints. Artist's Notebook: Mattie Hillock. ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece.
This week, New York artist Matthew “Mattie” Hillock shows us the process behind his new ”gradient_stacks” series. This body of work is much more explorative than my work last shown at Outlet gallery in Bushwick, which was very-site specific. I keep all my notes on my iPhone. My sketches for these “gradient_stacks” though have become landscapes I’ve been creating.
Once I finished creating each landscape, I would then enlarge/distort different sections of the “sketch” until I find myself lost in a color field. I don’t necessarily have a fully finished result with this work, because I intend on reusing these “sketches” and gradient stacks more meditatively rather publicly, which I think would only be fitting for the subject.What inspired me was standing in front of Monet’s Hay Stack at the MET. Best viewed at fullscreen, HD here. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Perhaps one of the best anti-smoking ads ever created. Comic strip for 08/29. Boost Your Productivity: Cripple Your Technology. Raghava KK: Shake up your story. 29 ways to stay creative » Design You Trust – Social design inspiration!