In Barcelona there is the Pablo Picasso Museum, where a hall is entirely devoted to one work by another painter, Velázquez’s Meninas Infanta. The room is filled with works by Picasso with the same composition but different motifs and planes. You can see that the artist was looking for the most expressive fragment in his style.
If you pay attention to a number of other artists, you will notice a similar tendency – one idea, different variants. In addition to the search for a compositional solution, such sketches developed the creative thinking of artists and in this search was born what we later have the opportunity to
to call a masterpiece of fine art. Creativity is a kind of creating connections between, sometimes, different things. Let’s look at the most important approaches to developing creative thinking.
Why develop imaginative thinking?
First of all, I develop my professionalism, look for new approaches to familiar subjects. Secondly, you are “putting” your hand, often practicing on simple tasks. Learn not to be afraid of mistakes, because only those who do nothing are not mistaken does nothing. You broaden your horizons and your visual memory, over time discard unnecessary elements of the drawing in favor of the important and most expressive. Learn to observe objects, favorable angles and texture. And finally, in our daily lives, you learn to how to solve a problem in a non-trivial way.
Exercise on associations with color
You can use music or smells to work with. Let’s look at this exercise using music as an example. Collect a playlist of different style compositions that you like. Don’t forget to add classics or songs without words – they better help you to abstract from the lyrics and feel the rhythm and instruments. Grab whatever tools and materials feel good to you – maybe it will be watercolor with round, flat brushes or a sponge.
Turn on some music, close your eyes and listen to the composition, try to transfer to paper the color the instrument is playing, its tones, its mood. It doesn’t matter if the people around you recognize the music in your sketch. It happens that these associations are diametrically different even among close people.
Do not take large sheets, literally A5 or even smaller, so you can make sketches quickly – during the sound of the composition. Pay attention to the mixture of materials for greater expressiveness, for example, watercolor and oil pastels, splashes, dry brush, salt.
Single line painting exercise
Imagine that your pen/pencil/brush is only capable of drawing a line like a thread without taking your hand away. You can layering lines, crossing lines condense. Use broken lines and soft plastic depending on the the subject matter. Don’t be intimidated if your first sketches aren’t the most successful this is because your brain is resisting the unconventional way of (instead of strokes, it’s a solid line). Despite the uncertainty first steps, after a few days you will get a completely different result.
Exercise for the development of abstract perception
Take an object, an object, anything that comes to mind or is at hand. For example, a pencil sharpener. Make a list of the object’s properties and associations. Note its function and main characteristic element.
Next, take a pen or pencil, limit the space of the sheet of paper to a small square and try to draw these feelings. Make several compositions. Use only one color and different line thicknesses.
As a result of this exercise it is useful to find out from others what emotions these compositions evoke in them, what they remind you of. This will allow you to understand whether you are on the right path, because these abstract compositions linearly and compositionally should cause most people more or less similar associations. In the future, this can be transferred to your commercial orders to evoke the right emotions in the viewer.
Exercise on tactile perception of objects
Ask someone to put an object in a bag or box without showing it to you. The object should not be obvious in shape. For example, no one doubts what an apple and a banana look like and, having fumbled for it in the box, you will draw this object from memory.
Take something more complicated: a perfume bottle, a stapler, or some other compound object. It may not be in plain sight every day or used often, and even if you recognize it, draw on your senses and the textures/textures of the object.
An exercise in combining the incongruent.
This exercise was used as a creative experiment by the Surrealists in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It looked like this: a group of people a group of people, wrote on a piece of paper one word at a time – one had a subject, another had a predicate and so on other members of the sentence. Then the pieces of paper were put together and made into sentences. Among the successful results of such experiments were the phrases “a graceful corpse will drink young wine” and “the meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the operating table.” Some illustrators build their style on the basis of just one this exercise alone – the difference is in the technique.
But we can, as an exercise, keep it simple and choose just an out-of-the-box word combination and then try to put that together in a drawing. Choose words from an area that is close to you. For example, if we’re talking about fashion, let’s take the word combination zipper dress. What did you picture? A dress made of zippers or a dress with zippers on it? Sketch it out and you will see how your imagination will create new and new associations of this combination in the process. This move works well for fantasy illustrations and is well remembered by the viewer for its originality, and you break patterns of thinking.