The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is ‘Inspiration’.
Because I love to make handmade cards, signs, gifts, and art work, I am ALWAYS on the lookout for new ideas to embed into my work, and you’d be surprised how and where I get some of my best inspiration. Today, I’m going to reveal all of my secrets to you. Are you ready? Here goes!
How to Find Inspiration
The answer to this question is this: open your eyes and LOOK for it.
That’s it. That’s really it. Intentionally set your mind up to SEE new ideas everywhere you go.
Where to Find Inspiration
I have the answer to this one too! Ready? Here it is – EVERYWHERE.
You do not have to purely rely on Pinterest, Youtube, and Google for inspiration. Yes, there is PLENTY of inspiration there and I get a ton of great ideas from the screen plus I’ve learned a lot of skills to include in my work from the screen, but there’s more. So. much. more.
We always have our phones with us these days, right? So be ready to capture inspiration ANYWHERE you are. Snap a pic and make a folder for your pics called ‘Inspiration’. Now get ready to fill it up!
FIRST, I’ll start with an obvious place, nature.
I love to include florals in my work, so I take pics of flowers and leaves up close and at different angles so that I can have all kinds of reference photos at my disposal.
We just got back from a camping trip in Idaho and I took a few pics for inspiration:
Notice, I didn’t worry about taking a fantastic composition for the reference pic, I just wanted to capture the flowers and leaves at different angles.
So on the drive home, I practiced drawing these flowers in a cheap dollar store notebook. The composition is my own rendition, but each flower or leaf came from my reference photos.
Practicing drawing what you see is such a great mindfulness activity. You are so focused on capturing the details, you cannot worry about anything else. Furthermore, I like to say that you haven’t really seen something until you’ve tried to draw it.
I always try to get a top down perspective as well as a side view and I also ensure I’ve got pics of the flower in various stages – buds, half open, fully open. The leaves of each flower are different so I ensure I have those captured in the reference photo at various angles as well.
Here are some more reference pics I took whilst camping this last weekend:
The sketches I made are FAR from perfect, but I just like to get the general shape of the flowers, leaves, and buds.
AND, here’s the thing about nature, it’s not going to accuse you of copying. I think nature is proud to be used as a feature in our art! It’s just out there showing off for us and begging to be noticed :-). FEATURE IT!
Other Random Places to Find Inspiration:
This photo of hanging lights came out of a 7×5 picture frame. It’s the advertisement thing that is showing in the place of a pic when you buy a frame. I loved the look of those lights hanging at different lengths and decided to draw and watercolor a simplistic rendition of it. It made me happy to make this little piece of art!
These glass beads were on my Dad’s window sill one day when I was visiting. The light was shining on them just right to show a lovely shadow. I took a pick so that I could look back and refer to how the light works on round glass beads and morphed it into water droplets for the ‘Watercolor’ image you see here from a previous BLOG post. That reference photo was how I knew where to put the darkest part of the water droplet and where to place the shadow.
MORE Inspiration pics:
This is a screenshot of an audio book I was listening to (Super good book by the way!) and I LOVE the color of the background. Also, take a look at the lettering and how it looks as if the letters are the windows from which we look through to see something on the other side. Way cool.
I can use this idea in my digital art – I can take a sample of the colors in this screenshot and then have it in my repertroire. I can also mimic this lettering effect in Procreate using a photo layer and a clipping mask over some larger block lettering.
Here is a way cool poster from Zach’s school about the different podcasts that are great for kids. I bet you can tell why I took a pic of this… You’re right! It caught my eye because of all the different fonts used. I can just look at this photo for lettering inspiration.
This pic came from a box of Keurig coffee my Father-in-Law got for Father’s Day. I loved the style of the numbers and wanted to have a reference pic for use in lettering projects.
Check out the cool banner style on this bag of pasta from Trader Joe’s! One of the lettering artists I follow actually designed this. When I use it in my work I will not copy it exactly, but use parts of it or the general shape etc.
In Conclusion
For this post, I challenged myself to create my quote (featured image at the top) using many of the inspiration pics I shared above. Can you tell which pieces I used? Tell me in the comments what you see!
Where do YOU find inspiration? I’d love to learn from you as well! Comment below to share more ideas for finding inspiration.
Alrighty friends! GO FORTH with new eyes for inspiration and see what you can find ANYWHERE you happen to be.
Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, signing off
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