Anime Dreams

Flash animations, Photoshop tricks, cartooning, and graphics fun

« Creating A Flash Cartoon Animation - Where To Start | Main | Simple Flash Anime can often be a better fit »

As I touched on in my previous post, one of the most difficult challenges for an illustrator or animator is finding inspiration. You know you want to create a new cartoon, illustration, or anime, yet that blank screen or blank piece of paper keeps staring you in the face daring you to try. Yet for a few lucky artists it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all. Why? What’s their big secret?

Their “big secret” is that they don’t focus on the screen or the blank piece of paper. They literally ‘throw’ the focus of their attention elsewhere, and sometimes even else-when. Somehow, conciously or unconciously, they realize that the brain is the most powerful yet literal search tool in the universe. If you tell it that “I just can’t find any inspiration” or “My mind is a complete blank”, it will single mindedly do everything in its power to satisfy what it happens to think you want. It will make absolutely sure that you will not find any inspiration – even if it happens to be sitting right across the table from you.

A similar thing happens if I tell you, “Whatever you do, don’t think of a blue elephant.” Most people, far and away, will try extremely hard, sometimes even clinching their teeth together, to not think of a blue elephant. And, the harder they try, the more they think about that poor blue elephant.

In this type of situation, you very literally have to break the cycle, to throw your focus of attention in a totally different direction. It is only by creating a new and hopefully a lot more pleasant path for your mind to travel that you can escape the mental deadlock condition.

Here’s a good example from my own experiments showing how I drew inspiration from a photo of Albert Einstein to get my brain working on something creative-

Title: Albert
Tools Used: Swishmax
Length: Continous
Audio: None
Download Size: 22k
Format: Flash SWF
Notes: Albert Einstein has always been one of my favorites, and so it was natural to pick him as the subject for a Flash caricature exercise. The original rough was done purely in monochrome to get the shapes right.

Then the colors were added along with some fine tuning to the geometry and animation. For example, the original animation looked more like Randy Johnson (Arizona Diamondbacks) than Albert - it looked like he was chewing tobacco or snuff....

Posted by Lem on November 2, 2005 | Permalink

Comments:

The comments to this entry are closed.