Burn your ideas

Art Discipline is a monthly drop of thoughts, processes, and behind-the-scenes from the artist behind OlliOlli World (BAFTA-nominated). Dive into character design, world building, and the weird joys of making art. Stay weird.

You are not going to get taught how to get ideas and design cool stuff. There’s always magic surrounding it.

But let’s try to pull back the curtain anyway.

Breaking Down the Creative Process_

When it comes to designing/drawing/creating, you can break it into two parts:

• Technical sh*t: the how we make the stuff that’s in our head a reality. Easier to explain and easier to break down into steps.

• Creative sh*t: the why, the what, the fun. More difficult to materialize and to explain in a clear way.

The latter is more abstract, but we will do our best to break it down here.

There are tons of tutorials and courses that teach technique, sculpting, drawing, modeling, animating, etc.

Those are the mediums to pour your creativity (technique is developing the skills to use those mediums).

This drop is about that other side: The ideas, expressing them regardless of your medium of choice.

Find those ideas (I mean it, run, find them)_

Sure, you can take notes, snap reference photos, or write down thoughts. But if you're working in a visual medium, you'll need to sketch. It's the clearest way to develop, test, and express ideas.

Sketching matters on a few levels:

1. Thumbnails for an illustration. Storyboards for a film. Quick visuals that lay the groundwork.

2. When learning to represent the real world and translate it into a 2D plane like paper we need sketching. Fast, low-pressure iterations build feedback loops. You learn faster when you sketch a lot.

Sketching can be used for studies, learning how something works and understanding their shapes (like a tree, a car, or the human body). Or it can be used for dumping ideas on paper to brainstorm and train our idea making part of the brain.

This last part I think is the most important as an artist and the one I spend the most time working on at the moment (after spending years working on the fundamentals — will talk about this in the future).

It’s better to start with a good idea and crappy execution than the other way around. If the idea is fun, you’re already halfway there.

Sketching Practice Framework_

Separate your sketching sessions that are for pure practice into 2 categories:

• Idea dumping: Have fun, force your mind to try new things. Explore those weird ideas*.

• Analytical Studies: Try to understand how something works. Don’t just copy what you see. Break it down. Understand it so you can build a visual library in your brain and draw from imagination. There’s a huge difference here between intention and drawing brainless just copying what you see. Save your energy and focus.

*and share them so we can see how weird you are.

Burning ideas_

Get those ideas out of your brain, sketch and dump. Build that cool collection of silliness.

Here are some from my digital sketchbook - I will do a proper post with my traditional sketchbooks.

These kids didn’t enjoy my sketches but I hope you’re more merciful.

Part of my digital Sketchpoop:

These are some of the digital sketches I do for fun (iPad sheets where I push ideas for practice using the kind of humour I want in my artworks). I should experiment more with the way I do things but most of these are about drawing ideas and getting them out of my brain.

Thank you and until the next drop :)

Art Discipline is an independently-run newsletter. If you’ve enjoyed it, consider sharing it with others.

Share this issue

Character Design Tutorial and Free Brushes here!