Stan: Do you ever find yourself confronted by a blank page with no idea what to draw? Luckily,
Irshad Karim from Drawabox is sympathetic to your dilemma. In this episode, Irshad gives a
brainstorming exercise to help get your creative juices flowing. If you want more helpful methods
for generating ideas in concept art, check out the full course at Proko.com/IrshadKarim.
Irshad: Before we begin, let's go over exactly what this course is meant to be
and perhaps more importantly what it isn't.
In this course I'm going to be going over a number of things I feel have a tendency to go overlooked.
We're not going to look at how to draw, instead we're going to take a deep dive first and foremost
into what we choose to draw. That is both in terms of coming up with ideas and also
how we can go about populating our drawings and designs with details that add value to a piece.
What do I draw is honestly one of the most common questions I hear but people only
seem to be talking about how to draw once you've decided on an idea. I try to push my own students,
that is those working through my free foundational drawing lessons on Drawabox.com
to set aside ample time to draw just for the sake of drawing,
to explore and play without the focus being on improving your concrete skills.
Of those who actually listen, most of them come back looking dumbfounded because they'll
hit that blank page like a brick wall not knowing what to actually draw in that moment.
It's very easy to think that ideas come from some magical intangible source. Even those
who've moved beyond the notions of talent will still find themselves inclined to think
that ideas are each and every one of them some miraculous thing. And in thinking in this manner,
they take a passive role in the generation of ideas.
Ideas become something that simply come to us, not things we tear out of the ether at a whim.
The fact of the matter is, we have ideas all the time. Ideas rush in and out of our psyches at
break neck speed and we pass on them as easily as passing on someone handing out pamphlets on
the street. We disregard them because we assume them to be of no value. We cast them away because
they're just these vague undefined things or maybe they're things we don't feel we're
well trained enough to execute properly. Maybe we're afraid we'll look stupid for the attempt.
Regardless, we come up with ideas as easily as we breathe and think.
We just don't see them as ideas. It's the chaos in our brains, nothing we bother to commit to memory.
The biggest thing I want you to walk away with from this course
is a different way of thinking and dealing with your ideas.
We're going to look at how we can take something vague and flash it out, how we can delve into an
absent minded thought and really explore it to find the value we may not have initially seen.
From There, we're going to look at the kinds of tools we can employ and how exactly they can
impact our ability to focus on the generation of ideas by handling some of the other heavy lifting
for us. I'll be giving you a peek into my own process by showing you a personal project that I'm
working on right now. It'll be primarily focused on the design of an environment, specifically a
fantasy tavern type building. So, I'll also share thoughts on how to tackle the kinds of problems
that can arise when creating a physical space in which real people are expected to engage.
If you are completely confident in your ability to generate ideas,
to explore them and break them down into problems for you to solve through design and to think about
how one can best communicate those solutions to others, then this course may not be what you're
looking for. If however you're interested in pursuing a career in concept design but just can't
wrap your head around how all of those artists on the internet churn out idea after idea generating
stacks of pages of thumbnails and paintings, then I'm confident that I can help you out.
So we've talked about the kinds of things a designer might learn over
the course of their education and their career, but I'm definitely not saying
you need to learn how everything in the world works before you become a designer.
These are things you'll pick up continuously. With every project, you'll probably end up doing a good
deal of research and you'll learn all kinds of new things each time. Over the years you'll retain
more and more of this information and will be able to leverage it in new and interesting ways.
Unfortunately, none of this actually tells us anything about how to approach design
right now. But don't you worry, I'm going to share with you a special little trick that will
serve as the backbone for how you think about design from here on out. It's called "what if".
Design is just the act of solving problems.
But a lot of students will sit in front of a blank page expecting the juices to just start flowing.
But nothing's going to flow if you don't have any sort of a starting point.
You might have a idea to start with. Maybe someone's asked you to design something for
some specific purpose. Or you're working off some drawing prompt or design brief. That's great. It
puts you one step ahead. But maybe you've got absolutely nothing to work off. In either of
these situations, What If is a tool that can help us by having us ask ourselves questions. Through
these questions, we can define our own smaller requirements and flash out the boundaries of what
it is we wish to create and what problem we ultimately are going to be solving.
When I've got no immediate ideas coming to mind, I'll try to ask
myself some really broad questions: What if 90% of the world was covered in water?
What if humans had domesticated bears instead of wolves? What if farming never took off and
society was forced to hunt and forge up until the modern age? What if rocks were edible?
All of these are random questions fueled by neuratic brainstorming session where I'd ask
myself the first questions that came to mind. These aren't small specific things, they're big
questions at the scale of all society and would fundamentally change how we conduct our lives.
This may seem like specific, targeted, and developed ideas
but they're not. Think of them like random thoughts you'd have in the shower. Hell,
if you're having trouble generating these kinds of thoughts, go stand in the shower for a bit.
Anyway, let's look at the first of these random thoughts in a bit more detail and ask ourselves
some more questions. If the world were 90% covered in water, how would that influence the
way in which human civilization arranged itself? With less land to develop, would we build upwards
rather than outwards? Would we build platforms out at sea like we do for offshore oil rigs?
How would it impact our diets? And would that cause us to change as a species?
What about transportation? If we ended up using water the way we use roads and highways,
how would that influence the construction of boats? As you start to peel back the layers in
the seemingly arbitrary question, you find yet more questions. Each of these questions could
be pursued more deeply, narrowing your way down into something specific. For example,
if in such a world, humans got around via swimming as much as we use walking and running today,
how would backpacks be different? Given the need for waterproofing to avoid drag when moving under
water and to avoid losing it all together were you to drop it in a particularly deep part of the sea.
Now that our problem has its boundaries defined and a list of considerations like waterproofing,
ease of movement, avoiding catastrophic accidental loss, we can think about the various ways in which
we might address each one, iterating repeatedly over a series of different backpack designs.
That is ultimately how design works. We define the specific problems that we want to solve and
then we draw a bunch of different possibilities. Not all of them will solve all the given problems
with some being better at certain issues and worse at others but by creating lots of solutions and
iterating over them, we eventually come to a handful that have the best overall potential.
Stan: Thanks, Irshad. That was just one of the many exercises you'll find in the full
course at Proko.com/Irshadkarim. Go check it out.