The Creative Process

People frequently ask me how I come up with my ideas.  I thought I’d blog about the method I used for my current project.  It is a method I use frequently.  I usually begin by choosing a season or a holiday.  This forms a background from which ideas emerge.  It also sets the tone and color scheme for the piece.

For my current project, Devil Looking for Trouble in a Small Town, I chose Halloween as my starting point.  Skeletons are part of Halloween decor, so I decided that I would try to make one.  I have made plenty of other Halloween figures, witches, jack o’lanterns, and the like but I had never made a skeleton.  I had been avoiding it due to the complexity of the subject. 

 

Once making a skeleton had been decided, I moved to the next step in the creative process.  I asked myself, “What is the skeleton doing?”  After that I quickly write down the first five actions that come to my head.    I find that five answers work best.  The first three are generally obvious answers, and I need to dig a little deeper to come up with the last two.  However, it is usually these answers that give me a starting point for my project.  I can only emphasize that this should be done quickly.  You don’t want to overthink things at this point.  

After I have my five answers, I examine each one and find which one really strikes me as something I really want to create.  In the case of this project, I settled on the answer that the skeleton is driving a car.  With that answer in hand, I moved on to the next question, “Why is the skeleton driving?”  Once again I wrote down five answers as quickly as possible.  My answers were: delivering a package, bouncing in a low rider, driving a limousine, came to that end by drinking and driving, and a devil made him do it.   

Once I had my five answers, it was time to do some critical thinking.  I examined the ideas I had written down and decide how feasible they might be to create.  With this project, the limousine, race car and low rider were discarded because there would be too much emphasis on the creation of the car.  A shiny limousine or race car would be hard to pull off in paper mache.  I decided against the package delivery to avoid anything that looked like a branded business.  That left me thinking about a generic car.  I decided that an old, damaged, rusty, crumpled car could be created easily in paper mache.  Also, concepts that are attached to a skeleton, such as death and decay played in nicely with an outdated, rusty automobile.    That led me to suggest an automobile with fins, which were popular about fifty or sixty years ago.  I say suggest because I wanted to make a generic automobile with iconic features rather than to try to imitate a specific car.  My hope was that any viewer will be able to make a connection to a memory of an old automobile of his or her choice rather than be directed to a specific car, which would be much harder to reproduce. (Also, I’m not sure of the legal ramifications of making a model of a specific vehicle.)

I returned to my questions and this time asked, “Why is a devil making or forcing the skeleton drive?”  This time the answer popped up immediately “He is joy riding!”  That seemed to fit so well that I did not pursue other avenues.  Instead I wrote down ideas about joy riding such as auto theft, “cruising the strip”, and “drinking and driving”.  I continued to ask questions until I felt I had a solid story which I used to create a piece of art. These answers added to the story by having the devil shown seated on the back seat of the car holding a bottle of beer.

That was the thinking that went into the stand alone piece of the car with the skeleton and devil.  Once I decided to make it into a diorama, I started the questions again.  “Where were they?”  “Why were they there?” “What type of place was it?”  Well, you get the picture…