Development of Creative Thought and Structure in Illustration and Graphic Art

Overcoming Mindsets as an Illustrator

As children, we were all bursting with imagination. With Lego, K-Nex and Meccano popular on the market, we could build anything we wanted with little plastic blocks. The piece above, by Christoph Niemann, is an illustration we can all particularly identify with - and it presents a point that with some imagination and different perspectives, we can portray any image effectively. When we owned Lego and K-Nex as children, we too thought in this way - they weren't just blocks, they were cars, flags and food.

We develop mindsets throughout our education on 'how things should be', and in order to become a flexible and effective illustrator, one must learn to break them. The first step is to identify the blocks in your mindset - sometimes, these aren't always visible to us and it takes someone else, such as a peer or a lecturer, to point them out. Once we have identified the issue, we must study the rule itself and challenge it through play - a good chance to stretch our right brains! Different forms of mark-making, drawing with the opposite hand, all of these could produce that spark of inspiration. Our logical left brains can then analyse the pros and cons of the experimentation we produce, and when to take a certain idea further. Following this process, I can learn to overcome a mindset, and hopefully look at a brief with fresh eyes.

Restating Problems

When receiving a new brief, artists and designers need to avoid predictability. Predictable answers will easily run stale, and a new, imaginative perspective is needed. To do this, there are a number of ways: the most effective, for me so far, is the method of asking random questions and relating them to your brief.

The picture above shows two responses to two random questions asked in Illustration, yet I have related them to the topic of my brief ("the underbelly of Birmingham"). The left page is an answer to "How do you plan to disguise yourself in real life?" and the one to the right is "On Noah's Ark, which animal would you throw off first?" Both of them address issues personal to me (not being able to lie, and protesting against the huge increase in student fees and the cuts) and they address the brief, but in a much more imaginative way than my first thoughts were when I originally received the brief. I feel, using this method, many artists and designers can look at their brief with a new imagination, and, through this method, I formed an idea which I took further into a zine.


Links I found useful:
Christoph Niemann, personal website and portfolio - http://www.christophniemann.com/
http://visual-journals.blogspot.com/