BrushTalk

Many years ago, a student in an engraving class mentioned to the tutor that they were short on ideas for their next engraving piece. The tutor replied with a couple of suggestions; the first was to fill a sheet of paper with random scribbles and then look for interesting shapes created within the resulting chaos which could form the starting point of a design. The second suggestion was to visit the local museum and examine exhibits for inspiration.

Thinking about it, lack of inspiration may be related to mood, depression or burnout, but whatever the reason, methods and techniques to get those creative juices flowing again are useful resources for both artist and designer. So, let’s take a look at a few of the options;

Words

Words play a very important role by the emotions and visual imagery they conjure, and in a design brief or book illustration for example, written or spoken words are the basis of the resulting visual imagery. A couple useful resources come to mind on the web, the first being the 500 list over at Sijun Forums. This list is useful when looking for ideas of what to paint or draw next, but perhaps if you already have a person, place or object in mind, try running it through the Googlism.com website for further association and exploration. In this example, I selected the ‘what’ radio button, and entered the word ‘frog’ in the search pane. After pressing the Googlism! button, I am presented with an inspirational list of frog related snippets, just begging to be explored as visual concepts.

Zoom

Looking at objects close up or magnified opens up a whole new world to explore. A good source is tree bark - if one stares for long enough, often all manner of strange faces and creatures in the texture and patterns become apparent. The reverse may be true if one is too narrowly focused on a particular subject. In this case, try standing back to see the big picture. An added health benefit with connecting with nature and the great outdoors may also be gained - fresh air and fresh perspective.

Below is a short video on the subject of design and creativity made by Rob Stacy of sinixdesign.com (you may need to turn the volume up a little once play commences).

Brush on Creativity

After watching Rob’s video, I was moved to explore his ideas further. In particular, the use of loose random brush strokes in order to create more abstract forms with an element of unpredictability to the outcome. My first task was to try and reproduce the brush variant used in the video. After achieving a fairly close likeness, I further explored the loose brush strokes concept, again with the aim of being ‘guided’ by the form of the strokes. Eventually I settled for five custom brush variants, all with very different stroke characteristics.

A New Twist on Palette Knives (Corel Painter IX/X)

For the second custom variant, I decided to focus on the more angular properties of the Loaded Palette Knife. After some adjustments, I was happy with the size and opacity response, but unhappy with the angle expression. What I wanted was more randomness in the stroke. Jitter was not the answer, so I tried setting the angle expression to Random; this was better, but the effect was too exaggerated. It was then when I remembered that setting Source as the expression utilised the luminosity of the source image (the currently selected pattern in this case) to control the associated stroke attribute (in this case, angle).

My next step was to launch the Patterns palette, where I noted that the currently selected pattern was Hens and Chicks. My thinking was that assuming the luminosity of this pattern was now being used to influence the twisting (angle) of the palette knife, then theoretically, changing the pattern scale in the Patterns palette or selecting a different pattern would effect the associated brush stroke. To my delight, the answer was yes to both. I could now introduce a controlled level of ‘random’ twisting in the stroke via. the current pattern/scale.

The head profiles below were created using mainly small brush strokes with the above custom variant (the Lumi Twist LP Knife which is included in the download folder in part 2 of this article), whilst letting the twisting of the individual strokes influence the designs. The associated pattern was a custom fractal, created via. the Make Fractal Pattern option in the Patterns palette menu.

In part 2 of Creativity and Inspiration, I will be demonstrating the third custom variant, and a neat method of highlighting interesting shapes.

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