Light Bulb Stew

So you know those times when you just have to come up with something, but your artist’s switch is off? You know, deadline soon, last minute redesign, school project with a really stupid prompt? I think I’ve got a real simple solution to this;

Let your brain wander. If it wants to, don’t fight it, the old “Don’t think about monsters” is a self-defeating mission; instead, let it go where it wants while keeping the task at hand in the back of your mind. I find that with a wandering mind you can come up with some ideas just as great as with a focused one; you may even make connections you wouldn’t have consciously noticed that could spark an idea.

 And here’s an example: About a week ago, I decided that I was going to get off my butt and finally design the starfish monsters for Cauldron. I decided to start with brittle star. Try to weasel my way out, “nope, you’re gonna draw this.” In the end I came out with a really cool design; starting with a prompt as simple as “make a brittle star monster,” I somehow ended up with an abominable semivertebrate desert hydra. It went something like this: (Behold, a glimpse into the mind of an artist! *Disclaimer: Lightbulb Stew holds no reponsibility for sanity loss as a result of viewing their brains.)

1. Make a brittle star monster.
2. Don’t feel like it, wanna think about dinosaurs.
3. I wonder how long snakes have been around?
4. If other reptiles are any indication, they must’ve been like land serpents.
5. ‘Serpent star’ is another name for a ‘brittle star’
6. I’ll put it in that sand ocean and give it snakes for arms.
7. Starfish can regenerate their arms, so that would mean it can regenerate its heads.
8. Hydras can regenerate extra heads.
9. Wait, there are already starfish that have branching arms.
10. And it’s a type of brittle star…

Plus, since it has a little brain in each head, the arms can still move if severed and the star itself gets smarter the more heads it has. All that from not feeling like starfish. (And in ten easy steps!) Hopefully, your brains work the same way.

It’s always seemed to me that I get my best ideas right before bed, and after giving it some thought it occurs to me that maybe it is one of the best times to draw or do anything creative; my reasoning is this:

• When creating is the very last thing you do in the day, you’re left with the summation of the day’s experience; this is fuel for creativity, aged to perfection before being autofiltered by your brain that same night during sleep.
• A lot of ideas probably won’t ever make it onto paper if not drawn the day they’re concieved, and unfortunately a lot of this out of our control; if you only think of something once in a day, your memory of it might not be ”bright” enough for the brain to store. It’ll empty out foggier memories, and with them your brilliant ideas.
• Maybe I’m the only one who’s like this, but I become more and more eager to draw the more ideas I have, and of course at the end of the day you’re bound to have the most. And if you want to draw, it’ll come out better. (Though Ihave a method for this that I’ll share later.)
• With less time to actually draw, you’ll be able to more quickly figure out which ideas are the best to use; given a time limit, usually you’ll go for either the most clever, most important, or most fun ones first.

Another thing to note is that since your most vivid memories are those experienced right before falling asleep, laying in bed just thinking is really good for this business; if you come up with a great idea in a presleep brainstorm, it’s not likely to be lost by morning.

So go ahead, pull some late hours; it’s worth it. Science says so.

The second interpretation of the last post, this time more pertinent to end products.

2) Just because you’ve seen something a thousand times before in media doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

You just have to find a good way to make a yours a little different. One way to do this is to combine a couple tropes. Seventh Sanctum’s Character Scrambler has exactly this idea in mind and makes some cool results; I once got this out of it:

The wild mad scientist who is a reincarnated princess and who stands alone against the Main Villain.

Sounds like a great character to me.

Another fun way to mix things up is to change the way you portray something; make the necromancer the good guy, make democracy a scary thing, turn your raptors into this:

One last way to make a unique variant is to examine the realistic outcome of it. TVTropes calls this a “deconstruction,” and also provides the example. Consider teleportation in science fiction. Nobody ever seems to take these far enough; teleporters would easily change society. There would no longer be any need for cars or other transportation; location is no longer a relevant factor in any event; you could drop a live warhead on the lap of an archenemy. Heck, if it works via disintegration and reintegration, then why not skip the reintegration part and use the teleporter itself as a death ray?

Another tip for creative’s block:

Mundane doesn’t necesarily mean uninteresting.

There are actually two different ways you can interpret this tip, both of which are equally valid.

Reason 1) Just because you see something everyday doesn’t make it boring; there’s probably plenty of stuff you didn’t know about stuff you see every day. Here’s a few examples:

  Yeah, this is actually something seagulls do all the time; they steal fish from eagles. I’ve even seen a video of a seagull just waltzing into a convenience store and grabbing a bag of Doritos unnoticed by staff.(Also, I apologize to anyone living on the mainland; I live by the coast and so seagulls are something I see everyday.)

You know what this is? It’s a maggot of a bluebottle fly, as seen under a scanning electron microscope. Looks kinda like a little bug-eyed walrus, huh? Bluebottles are a common type of blowfly, which are the garbage eating flies you see everyday in your trash. Yeah, you’ve got little walruses eating your garbage. These little buggers make an impact on several different professions; to farmers, they’re livestock pests; to doctors, they make an excellent agent to fight necrotic rot; (which is really nasty; that’s essentially a small patch of decomposing flesh that spreads across your body if nt taken care of.) and they are great evidence in homicide investigations; the development of the little guys is so temperature dependent that you can tell both when and at what temperature a body was when dumped by examining the growth stage of maggots.

I’m sure you’ve seen an earthworm wherever you live, they’re very prolific. You know that band around an earthworm’s front half? That’s actually the reproductive area. Speaking of reproduction, earthworms are hermephrodites; this means that every earthworm is both male and female. The longest earthworm ever found was a whopping22 feet long.Earthworms don’t actually eat dirt as people often say; rather, they consume small grains of rock to use as gastroliths. The rocks mash up their food since they don’t have teeth; this is the same thing that some birds do and some dinosaurs did.

So see? Next time you’re stuck for ideas, try going outside and plugging the first thing you see into Google.