If there's one question artists, writers and musicians hate with a passion aside from "What do you mean you want to get paid for this!?" it's "where do you get your ideas?"

Well, until about last week, I didn't have any sort of decent answer. I would try to deflect the question as much as humanly possible or give some sort of self-deprecating answer as though the font of creativity was in some sort of secret location and it was my obligation to hide its whereabouts. The truth is, I really didn't know or at least I didn't understand. That said, I've been riding a creative streak working with Ideas and then just sticking with Illustrator as Ideas for Android may as well be called "nyah nyah nyah you're not on iOS, bitch! Enjoy the lack of features!" I haven't actually written anything decent in the past two years until last week when I actually wrote a children's story which I'll illustrate and eventually seeking publication.

Where did I get the idea? It started with a post on Tumblr with various pictures of sad looking teddy bears as superheroes. Still tired as hell, I crawled back into bed thinking about the teddy bears and applying the same technique to classical myths. The one that stood out most was The Lyre Of Orpheus… with teddy bears. I then considered the story as a means of teaching children about death. Nine hours later, I had a first draft I was happy with. Three days later, I added things to it to explain just a little more.

Teddy bear superheroes + classical mythology + modern consideration = new story idea and eventually a story.

Another example of confluence would my most recent picture at the time of writing: Office For A Year. The idea came after I was simply staring out the bay windows at work. I've been there for almost a year and have seen the four seasons pass in that time. The original idea for the picture was just to draw the outside scene in black and white and add colour casts over them, each for the seasons until I thought of something from Secret Of Mana:

"Spring, summer, fall, winter,
spring again and you may enter."

It's the secret of getting into the forest of moogles! The last panel in the piece may be an entry, it may be an ex, but it is the future as based on a rhyme from my past.Another big difference in this from my earlier work is using different brushes. The one I use most here is the Space Textures brush from Collision Theory. I was rather frustrated working with the Spring panel until I played around with the brushes and found this one was exactly what I was looking for.

Work + play + reference photos + new brushes = Office For A Year.

That's the answer. Ideas for creative work aren't singular at least for me. They are a combination of a number of influences, memories and interests that lead to a new creation.



I hope this has answered your question. For further examples of confluence, please read Neil Gaiman and Kurt Vonnegut.