What do you do to stimulate your creativity?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
a particular song?
puppy's face?
walk on the beach?
i have to give up my crutch, CANDY, woes. diabeets. 5 days and counting without a candy bar fix.
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Sleep........Whenever I actually get a good nights sleep, I wake up with a thousand creative ideas.
Sometimes a new toy will inspire me- such as a new creature or character. =-)
Music.. I rarely go a whole day without having the music turned on. And it can be anything from Hammerfall, kamelot, Dan Hill, Alan jackson, Miracle of Sound, europe etc etc (basically lsiten to all genres of music.. almost)
I also get inspiration from the games I play (Guild Wars 2 and Rift) or in the case of Elder Scrolls Online, plan to play :)
My dreams are a big inspiration and so is my stories too *smiles*
Hmm Life experiences, emotions and a challenge also inspire me a lot...
hmm.. somehow I don't think I can give only one source for my inspiration.. *laughs*
Stop using apps that curtail it.
When I need inspiration I enter crowded rooms wearing ping-pong ball eyes and mutter my grocery list to myself in pig-latin.
If that fails, I stand on my head in a bucket of treacle going "SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK!"
Playing with the cats helps too.
Reading old comic books. Especially those wacky 1970's and '80s Jack Kirby things! Crazy stuff.
Destroying The Universe makes for an interesting diversion. That's a personal favorite of mine.
Watch old Bugs Bunny or Three Stooges. Or anything by Jay Ward.
Looking through all those old unfinished projects can be inspiring. I'm always amazed at the number of ideas I give up on, but find long after the fact and complete!
And sleep too, as mentioned, is great fun. Much more fun than being awake. Sometimes.
And if all else fails, post on a forum and ask how other people stimulate their creativity!
:)
recipe for an afternoon nap, a fastgrab, and a couple hours in Dragonquest! and regular old pen and paper.
Slurpee brainfreeze is like a cognitive reboot :) hopes, after the thaw. yoww :lol:
A friend suggested a random grab of character and set or props, and I'm finding that works really well for me; sometimes unusual combinations get me thinking more creatively. Or I grab a freebie or a product I haven't used in a while. Or a long walk. That works for stress relief.
What do I do to stimulate my creativity?
Dramatic, powerful, and/or emotionally charged music will usually get me into an inspired state, but once I actually start working the world disappears around me and I work in silence as the music becomes internal rather then external.
I revel in a good thunder and lightening storm!!! Absolutely REVEL!!!
A walk or hike in the forest will do it for me every time. My imagination will start to overflow with images and stories.
Viewing the artwork of others is always extremely inspiring. (2D artwork such as drawing and painting - 3D artwork such as clay, stone or bronze sculpture - performance art such as dance - literature in the form of stories and poems - etc.)
Edit: Oh... you know how people sometimes say they come up with some of their best ideas in the shower or do their best thinking at such times? Well, I find that my creativity will inexplicably kick in while weight lifting sometimes. In a way I'm relaxed and let go of the world around me and my imagination starts to wonder or I focus in on a design problem that has been bothering me during this time.
For me, it's lack of sleep that results in a lot of free-association and new ideas.
Trouble is, when I wake up the next day, I realize most of those ideas were crap... but sometimes - sometimes - there's one that wasn't.
I can't trigger it on command, unfortunately, and it seems pretty random. I might go months without any creative ideas, then get a whole pile of interesting ideas in an hour. Definitely doing nothing different at all hurts the creative process, as does lack of sleep for me.
Getting a nice influx of new ideas seems to help on occasion; could be just browsing through the galleries, or watching a movie, or reading a book, or seeing some cool project, once or twice while hiking, or even a dream. I might be bored out of my mind, clicking through a gallery from one pic to the next, then all the sudden I'll see a render that catches my interest, and I'll think "that's a cool idea. But you know what ELSE would be a cool idea too..." and ideas will start to bounce around in my head and maybe hours or days later I'll latch onto something that's not even in the render and go with that. It's like seeing and then agreeing with somebody elses' good idea works as a starter on my creative process.
@robkelk, I hear you on the dreams, the same thing has happened to me multiple times in the past, it's pretty funny. A long time ago I actually kept a pen and paper by my bed so I could scribble down ideas and not forget them, but the next morning more often than not I'd look at what I wrote and think... uh... no. (It also doesn't help when you have bad handwriting and write in the dark half on the paper and half on the bedstand.)
Sometimes music helps me get excited about working on a project, but I don't remember ever actually being inspired to start a project because of music, but that's just me.
While I can certainly understand and sympathize with this sentiment, I wouldn't state it so harshly because any medium or tool an artist employes is going to influence and place restrictions on their creativity... not just software apps. It is the responsibility of the artist to recognize, work within, and go beyond the limits of whatever medium and tools they are using. Therefore, I would not tell them to stop using the tools but rather make them aware of the influences and limitations the tools tend to impose on creativity, which I think you have done. ;-)
Having creative ideas isn't much of a problem for me. My problem is I have difficulty seeing them through to completion. I tend to work best when I'm exploring the creative idea, when I'm at the stage where I'm not sure how things are going to end up. Once I've envisioned the completion of a project and how to bring it fully to that end then it has pretty much ended for me and I no longer have a desire to bring it to its conclusion. This is why I often find it works best for me to just jump right into something without planning it out completely because it tends to motivate me better to finish the project.
If I sit down and plot out every step along the way and everything that needs to be done and every detail of the project then in my mind that project is already done and I have no interest in repeating it. An open ended project where even I don't know how it's going to end is far more engaging to my imagination.
I do that and have seen the same in other people I know. Suddenly it's not creative; it's just . . . drudgery.
I do that and have seen the same in other people I know. Suddenly it's not creative; it's just . . . drudgery. +1 to this one. Idea, start Idea, do some work on idea, Idea goes from fun to work, drop Idea... But I'm trying to do better... not much to show yet but trying...
Like I posted in the other thread right now with 3D I'll learn a new technique, which inspires a new project, and while working on the project I learn a new technique, which inspires a new project, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not really beating myself up over this because it's a great way to learn but at some point I'm going to have to go back into my WIP folder and finish all these loose ends up.
Outside 3D I've found there tends to be a big difference between creative works I'm doing for myself and creative works I'm commissioned to do. If it's stuff for myself it's pretty easy to drop it when I no longer feel motivated to continue it. When it's stuff I'm being paid to produce, well that's pretty good motivation to finish it up. :lol:
No doubt that's part of the reason I suffer from debilitating chrometaphobia.
I used to beat my head against a concrete wall - but it started causing too much damage to the wall.
So now I fill a container with a flavorful beverage and re-read fantasy works by Lord Dunsany or Clark Ashton Smith. I usually end up looking at the whole world with new eyes, as they say, after an hour or so.
Oh dear! This all sounds so dreadfully familiar! :red: ;-P
Thank goodness I haven't succumbed to chrometaphobia, yet! :bug:
To stimulate creativity, I Lucid Dream:) Hense why I like sleeping:)
I get inspiration from dreams, or from movies and shows, or from reading books and webcomics, or from gaming and roleplaying - anything that leaves me with a strong image or mood. I always come home from a movie with great visuals wanting to go to work. True, I came home from Pacific Rim wanting to make giant robots and that was not a reasonable goal at the time, but I went to work on my current project with renewed zeal that day even though it was unrelated.
When I get really stuck, as sometimes happens while I'm working on a utility project in particular, I turn it off and go for a walk or (this time of year) a swim. Exercise pumps more blood to the brain and clears out the negative neurochemicals, gets some endorphins moving through there to get rid of the "screw this project and everything else" mood. Yes, I'm "off the clock" for that hour or two, but good products come from that process and make me enough money to make it a worthwhile time expense.
Oh, those blurry I've been reading to long ones? Does that really help your rendering? I find myself near blind after doing that.... even a hour or so later most times...
Nah, I can get the blurry effect any time I want just by taking the glasses off. Or increasing the alcohol content of the flavorful beverage.
It's just a matter of unfocusing the mind to allow 'interesting; thoughts to come up.
Stimulating creativity doesn't seem to be my problem. Channeling it, on the other hand... :lol:
As far as 3D graphics work goes, I get inspired by books (or sometimes lyrics) more than anything visual. If I see something in a movie, well, someone's already made it, so I'm not so interested. But if I read something in a science fiction book, often I want to try to render it the way my mind pictures it.
The other source of inspiration for renders comes from my other creative efforts, e.g. writing, especially some manga projects I'm working on, and a card game.
I've found that adding a constraint or two actually enhances my creativity. It's fun to figure out how to work around or within a constraint. For example, when I was working on my card game, I used Feng Shui ideas as a structure to build from. I've heard about some research recently that supports this, too. Nice overview here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/how-intelligent-constraints-drive-creativity.html
Sometimes the challenge is trying to get software to do something I haven't seen it do before. I think this is why I don't do much postwork. I have more fun trying to figure out how to get the effect I want within DS than I would editing the image in Photoshop afterward. ;)
...that's pretty much how I work though not just pushing the app, but the new system I built as well to see how much it can handle (discovered it can't deal with cloning 512 flutterbys in an 8 x 8 x 8 matrix).
A recent pic I did involved a lot of test renders to see if certain things would work together without crashing the app during rendering, most notably an atmospheric camera and a fog generator to give the look of one scene superimposed over another. The only postwork I did was adding the border and text elements to make it look like a book cover.
Currently rendering a scene with 33 individual flytterbys (from Noggins' Ultimate Butterfly Collection) using the Send in the Clones Pro script and 16 groupings of Lisa B's plants, basically a "transmapapalooza" along with an atmospheric camera to add some depth. I could have just gone the easy route and used two Butterfly Swarms from the collection, however those a more low res (primarily for animation purposes) and thus produce an undesirable fringing effect around the wing edges in the final render. The real time consuming part was arranging and posing all the little critters.