Drawing Funny Things - A 10-Minute Brainstorming Exercise for Ideation

1. Welcome to Class - Tools & Project: Welcome to prompt number nine of the Creative Juice, where we will get some fun into your drawing. Hi. I'm Ulrike, a top teacher here on skillshare, and I will teach you a super quick and easy way to distill your ideas into a fun scenario, which you can then freely explore through sketching. This will give you a fantastic starting point for a witty drawing. All you need to bring is pen and paper. No need to get fancy. You can bring the pen you like most. You will also need a timer. As this is a creative short class, we will stick to 10 minutes for our brainstorming session. I recommend you also get some fresh inspiration or watch the other prompts of the creative juice before we start. As a project, you are asked to share your brainstorming page and the final scenario you came up with. As an extra, watch out for a special caption contest at the end of the class, and you can win one year of skill share. I can't wait to see your fun site. Let's begin. Met you in class. 2. Prepare Your Brainstorming Page: Let's start by preparing our brainstorming page. First, we're going to narrow down our topic a little bit. And since this class is part of the Creative Juice series, our main focus is oranges. Oranges are the stars of our funny picture. So let's draw one at the top of our brainstorming page. This will easily set the theme and empower you to fight the fear of a blank page. Easy, right? The next guideline we have is to find a joke that revolves around the theme of at night. The following categories will help you distill your ideas. We'll start with the ‘What‘ Then the ‘Where’. And finally, we will brainstorm ‚the twist‘. Instead of coming up with a wide range of ideas, as in traditional brainstorming sessions, your task is to boil down your ideas. Start with nine possible options for the What. Write the number 1 to 9 under the What . For the Where we'll aim for five options. And for the twist, we will condense our creativity even further and find only three ideas. I'll show you how to turn all of this into a fun scenario in the next lesson. Now set your timer for 10 minutes and stick to this window. This will prevent you from overthinking and allow your intuition to take over. Keep in mind that all ideas are welcome. No judgment. The magic happens within a limited number of creative ideas. So let's enjoy the momentum. I will meet you for our brainstorming session. 3. Brainstorming Session: Let's start brainstorming. First category what? What is our orange doing at night? As you've seen in the title, I call this the boiling session because we are going to turn up the heat on our brainstorming process and boil down our ideas step by step. As with all brainstorming exercises, anything goes. Let your orange have the craziest night ever. Of course, it could be doing something fancy like sleeping or checking its stocks. Although that could be livestock. Okay. Maybe it's working the night shift somewhere. It's up to you. Keep going until you have nine ideas. You can pause the video at any time and brainstorm alone, or just mute me for a moment. For my orange, I've also decided that she could watch the Super fruit bowl Cherry City Chiefs versus Strawberry 49ers. Okay. Or how about the orange just stargazes and discovers constellations like the Great Banana Bear. That's all perfectly fine. Alright, we have two options left, and I'm so curious to read your ideas. Okay. I think we need someone to secretly save the world, the super peaceful orange society. So let's have our orange take part in that. Or we could dress her up in a beautiful gown and send her to a gala in New York. Perfect. Now that you have nine ideas, quickly pick one from the list without overthinking it. For me, it's the night shift. That sounds interesting. Once you've decided, use this in your next step and imagine the where - where the what is happening. Watch out and keep an eye on the time. We now know that the orange is working the night shift. The question is where. Humor comes from the fact that it's completely out of character, unexpected or exaggerated or all three. Now imagine the orange working in a bowling alley. Five options are heat two. Let your imagination do the work. Break with the ordinary, and I'm sure you'll come up with lots of funny ideas. It could also be working in a factory or laboratory. You can also break away from analogies based on the human world. I would love to see that. Now, choose the one that sticks out for you. I want my orange to work in a factory. Okay, let's summarize. We have our orange working the night shift in a factory. Now we need a twist, something completely absurd for the setting. Look closely at the orange. It could be a factory that makes lotion for orange peel skin. I think our orange would probably be an expert at this. Think outside the box for the twist and remember we are on heat three. You only need three ideas, but be quick to stay within the ten minute time frame. It could be a juice factory. Or a fruit clothing company. Whatever it is, pick one idea to go forward with. Let's see, I take the juice. Bravo, most of the brainstorming is done. We've now gone from the what to the where to the twist. In the next step, we'll prepare our sketching page and summarize our fun scenario. See you in a bit. 4. Prepare Your Sketching Page: Congratulations. We have completed our brainstorming page. Our final task is to write a summary for our sketching page. At the top, of course, we put our star, the orange, and the fact that our scenario takes place at night. We also know that our orange works on a night shift, and that this night shift takes place in a factory, and a factory produces juice. Share your result as a project in the project section. As an extra, try to do three sketches and stay again within a ten minute time frame. This keeps the process short and fun and will help you to stay on the intuitive side of ideation. I started by imagining what such a factory might look like. Or, of course, my little orange could call in sick. You have free hand now. Enjoy your sketching. When you're ready, it's time to drop the pen and unwind a little. I invite you to take a look behind the scenes at my workflow in Procreate where I will turn one of my sketches into a fun little cartoon. See you there. 5. Drawing a Cartoon in Procreate - Demo: This is the sketch I want to work with: the orange juice factory. Now join me for a little peek behind the scenes of my workflow in Procreate. I've set up my sketch as a reference background and reduced its visibility. This way, I can draw over it in new layers. For brushes, I only use my Cutiebrush, similar to the calligraphy brush in Procreate. As you can see, I always work with lots of layers, which I can easily merge when I'm done with the individual elements. Using separate layers gives me great flexibility to move around certain elements and erase overlaps more easily. All right, here comes some simple lettering for the Super juice factory sign. And, of course, this building needs its windows. And you can see how easy it is to erase the overlaps when working on separate layers. As you bring your sketch to life, remember to add some night elements. For me, it's simple the moon and the stars. I was also wondering what I could do to make this factory a little special and add more humor, maybe through analogies with oranges. That's why the entrance is designed to look like an orange. With this in place, it gets really funny when the entrance of the staff is the same as the one for the incoming goods. Now, let's draw the employee. Voila, this is my hero on the way to the night shift at the orange juice factory. You see, the humor is already in the setting. In the final piece, I've changed a few things in the background like a juice gallon that serves as an industrial tank. Take this as an example to look for real life elements in your theme and stage them in unexpected ways. Now, this little cartoon is already pretty funny, but with the right caption, it gets even funnier. And that's what we'll be doing in the upcoming final lesson. See you all for the big caption contest. 6. Caption Contest & New Prompt: Congratulations on completing the class. Whether you've already started drawing or not, enter the caption competition. With that, we follow the great tradition of The New Yorker, where readers are invited to find a caption for their cartoons. The readers will also judge the submissions. As a big fan of The New Yorker, I love this interactive approach with the cool cartoons and seeing what funny and clever lines the readers come up with. The winner will be also published in The New Yorker magazine. What a fantastic reward. The winner of our caption contest will receive one year of free premium membership to Skillshare. All you have to do is come up with a funny caption and share it with us as part of your project, along with a review for the class. You can download the image from the resources section. Drum rolls. Here's my attempt. Oh, boy, this job is killing me. Says my little orange. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how funny you think this is in my project. Now that you've completed this class, you're ready for the grand finale of the Creative Juice, the Orange Wonderland. This Procreate class is very special to me as it is the result of a fantastic collaboration with Skillshare. For the Procreate playbook, Skillshare invited nine talented artists to share their art and workflows with you, and I'm thrilled that my orange Wonderland and I are part of it. You can download the eBook for free using the Link in my profile. I look forward to seeing you in this class soon and sharing even more details of this graphic orange adventure. Follow me so you don't miss out. In the meantime, I can't wait to see your brainstorming pages. Stay creative. Tschüss.