Think Like an Artist: Cultivate Your Creativity

1. Welcome to Class!: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another class from me, Kristina Hultkrantz. I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Mariefred, Sweden. This class is going to be all about cultivating your creative practice, and what creativity is. Because staring at a blank piece of paper is no fun, and I don't want you to stress about not having this magical natural ability to come up with new, fresh ideas all the time. In this class I'm going to be sharing with you different exercises and fun, and playful things to help cultivate this creativity and help you to invent new original ideas. The definition of creativity is the use of your imagination and original ideas to create something, it is your inventiveness. In this class I'm going to help you invent original ideas. Doesn't that sound fun? To start off with, I'm going to be telling you a little bit about different kinds of sketchbooks that you can use to cultivate your creativity and your artistic vision and everything like that, and then we can go into so fun exercises. We're also going to be getting, crafting this class, and I'm going to share with you how to create your own magic prompt chart. This class is for any and all artists of any level and you only need general office in art supplies to take this course. You will be needing some sort or sketch pad or a couple of them or something like that. A pretty sketchbook, ugly sketchbook, whatever you want. You will also be needing general art supplies like pens and pencils, erasers. We'll also be using a glue stick and a scissor, we're getting crafting in this class. A sticker might be cool to have, if you have that around, and we'll also be using scrap pieces of paper and you will need some container like a jar or pretty box or something like that. So yeah, I'm really excited to share these fun, playful exercises with you to help you cultivate your creative practice make you think more like an artist. Let's get started. 2. Pep Talk: Now it's time for a little creativity Pep Talk.I always like to add these to my classes because I think a lot of the time confidence is something that holds many artists back and they think that other artists have it all figured out, and that some artists are just born with this incredible imagination. But I'm here to tell you that I am 100 percent sure or 90 percent sure, 99, that these people have cultivated their creativity, is something that they work on constantly to develop and feed. It's not something that they were born with. Maybe some people are born with slightly bigger imaginations and they're able to cultivate that at a bigger scale. But we all can create creativity in our lives and be inspired by different things and everybody has value and all that good stuff. I wanted to talk a little bit about my creativity journey, and one thing that I've noticed in the past year is that I've let my creativity and my personal projects sit on the back burner for a long time. I have two small children and I have spent the past four years being a full-time mom and working on my art more part-time, I would say. Before that, also I have just always been more focused on my client projects and marketing myself and selling and pitching so that you stop seeing your art as a business and a money-making rather than a practice that you do that you love and that really feeds you. This past year in 2020, I realized the things that are more important in life and that's your family and taking care of yourself and all that stuff. I've started to realize that a sketchbook practice and a personal art practice is something that I really need to bring into my creative life. It's really important not only for myself to not always feel like my art is something that I have to pitch and sell, but that can be something for me that I don't have to share, that again, just like trying to develop my skills and try new things because that's what art is all about, it's really fun and playful. I wanted to talk about different kinds of sketchbooks and things that you can have. There's all kinds of ways that you can use sketchbooks. One way is. Of course, to have that beautiful sketchbook that you fill with paintings and drawings. But you know what? I'm not one of those people, have never been. I always feel like creating such a beautiful artwork in a sketchbook feels like a waste somehow, and I always like to do a final artwork on my iPad or on a beautiful piece of paper. But I can understand that you would want to do that. Other sketchbooks that I love are ugly sketchbook. This one's front forever ago and just has clippings of different things and scribbles and just ideas that make no sense to anybody but me and definitely don't make sense to me now. Just doodles and things like that just to get stuff out of your head and do something with your hand. Another sketchbook that I like is similar, but I like being able to like rip out pages and scribble ideas and sometime just test out new materials. It's nice to have another sketchbook like that. That just is like scrap paper really that you are not too precious about, that can kill your creativity if you don't, every page you're thinking has to be perfect to match the flow, especially if you're going to be showing your sketchbook later, it can be really stressful. I've been trying to work on a prettier sketchbook that has more finished ideas but this is new to me. So it's only been awhile that I've been trying to focus on just creating art for the sake of it and not for my portfolio or to sell or Instagram or something like that. I have been trying, but I need to try more.I have decided that my Fridays are going to be fun Friday, so I can do whatever I want on Fridays since I have a full-time schedule now. I have decided that Fridays I can draw all day or take skill share classes all day just to cultivate my creativity maybe even take a break and take a super long walk in the woods.Why not? Then the last one I wanted to talk to you about is a resource library sketchbook and that is something that we are going to be talking about in this class. I look forward to sharing with that. I am going to keep that for a couple more lessons. You're going to have to wait for that. But yeah, creativity is something that you can create and work on. It's just about adding it to your daily practice and generally in your life. 3. Rules!: Now I thought I'd share a couple of small ideas that might help to cultivate your creativity. These are all going to sound a little bit counter-intuitive, but I swear that adding rules to your artwork and art practice actually helps the creative juices to start flowing because you have to start problem-solving. A couple of rules that you can set out for yourself are choosing a limited color palette. Maybe if you always use 20 plus colors, unlimited colors, maybe you can only use two. What are you going to do to create that illustration or artwork with just two colors and make it work, and have contrast, and be interesting, or if you always use tons of colors where if you do it in black and white and still again, have that contrast. This is a couple of things that you could try. You could also change tools and reduce the amount of tools that you use. If you always work digitally, maybe you should try out actually drawing on paper for once. This is something that I need to work on. I actually noticed the other day that I was trying to pinch-zoom my paper when I was sketching, which is so crazy that working on an iPad has changed the way that I draw because I think that I can zoom in on paper. I also want to mention maybe changing the size of the paper that you work on. One way of really forcing you to make some interesting decisions is to work in a really small Canvas. If you were to only create artwork in such a teeny little square, how would you make it still interesting to look at? That can be something that you can work on to, on your sketchbook, you can create little boxes like four on a page, and how can you make those compositions interesting? It could be like a fun little project. You can even create all of these rules for yourself at the same time to really push yourself to try something different. Again, I want to mention that this is about having fun and pushing yourself and you don't have to show these to anybody. They can be just for yourself and if you mess up, you can paint over the page, you can rip it out, or you just ignore it and then keep going in your sketchbook and then we look back, at the beginning of your sketchbook, and then the end, I think you'll be amazed at the difference practice and testing out and trying new things has made in your artwork. 4. Reference Library: Moving on, I want to talk to you about this reference library that I was talking about. That is a specific sketchbook that I have created to reference. It's not about trying new things, it's about cultivating my ideas in here. I have this sketch book. It is like a photographer has created a sketchbook. It's like there's some photos of things. It feels like it's already started, and that could be interesting. Also it's just I had it, so why not? It's quite big size, and it's nice quality. But I wanted to say, what can you use a reference library for, and why is that interesting to have? As artists, we're very visual people, and I think that many of us are stuck in finding inspiration via Pinterest or Google, and constantly looking at other people's work or photographs, and things like that. But I think it's important to sometimes use words and prompts in your own work to cultivate new work, and create from there. So creating a reference library that you have maybe reference photos, but then they become a little bit different, and then you can reference your references to then make the one more step away from somebody else's work. That's of course really important, because I don't want you to plagiarize other people's ideas. It's important to have your own original ideas. Your original idea doesn't have to be like reinventing the wheel every time, it can just be pinch different than somebody else's idea because you are unique and all that cheesy stuff. For my reference library I have been really wanting to learn hand lettering a little bit more. So I have created a whole section in my reference library to practice letters, so one spread per letter, and I've been looking for different letters when I'm going through the Internet, looking through Pinterest, books, magazines, and I'll stumble upon a beautiful letter and I'll add that too here. I'll probably tweak it a little bit to make it my own a little bit, and then when I go back to create lettering I can reference these things that I've already referenced and tweaked, and then I can tweak them a second time to get what I mean. I've done the whole alphabet, and numbers as well, and this is a really fun practice also just to have some project to do so you feel like you're being creative. But you're not forced to create some finished artwork which can sometimes feel stressful. So it's nice to have like little activities for your looking for inspiration. Another idea for a reference library would be if you create florals and botanicals that you take a nature walk and you record different leaf shapes or flowers that you find in your neighborhood. If you wanted to do a little bit more exotic, and you can look online obviously to different countries and different flowers. Because I know that I always get trapped in drawing the same things, like I only know the names of a couple of flowers, so when you're googling it's hard to have this huge knowledge of different wildlife and flowers, and all that stuff. So if you record different flowers and leaf shapes, and other details like that that you'd find in nature, it's much easier than if you were going to just sit here and google like forest things, that's not going to come up as much stuff as if you were on a walk, and you might find those chestnut pods and those little funny things. I don't even know what they look like, little flying helicopters that come off of maple trees, or little funny twigs, or stuff like that that you wouldn't maybe think of in your head. That's another idea of a reference library that you could be. It's not about creating finished artwork, it's just about creating things to reference. You get what I mean. I also want to talk about another idea that I think is interesting and that is working from prompts. But I think also working from memories. I personally have a diary that I write in everyday, it's one of those like line a day kind of things, it's just a couple of lines. A couple, like a little paragraph per day. For the past five years I've been doing that. I can go back and read how my day was like two and a half years ago, or a couple of days ago, and maybe that will bring back some memory of that day, and you might most likely didn't photograph that, but you will bring ideas to you. So I think that's a great idea of remembering things. That could be a part of your reference library, to create like a diary section with nice memories that could be part of your work, like feelings or situations that you were involved in. I have a section called "Everyday amusings, observations, and prompt lists". I've added a couple of situations here that I remember like that would be funny to draw one day, such as, I live in a apartment building where there's quite a few old ladies who live here, and they meet up with their walkers. One day I saw them all sitting on their walkers in the middle of town, and they were talking about their ailments of being old, and I just thought that was the sweetest thing I've ever seen. So I think that'd be the cutest scene ever to draw a little group of old ladies having a coffee break, but in the middle of town sitting on their walkers. Stuff like that. I've also recorded the feeling of when we were driving me and [inaudible] , one summer in Gotland, which is an island outside of Sweden, the mainland. It's just so beautiful there with dirt paths and they're always lined with wild flowers, and that would be a beautiful scene to draw, I can imagine, we were in a car, but like in a bike, that'd be a beautiful scene. Something like that. I think that would be great to record little scenes like that. Instead of having a photograph that maybe you took to reference, you just reference like your memory and ideas, and that way you have an idea of what it looked like, but you'll be forced to invent things. That's my introduction to creating a resource library for yourself, and I welcome you to create a resource library for yourself, which could be like me with lettering, if that's something that you wanted to try, or with botanicals. You could also do people, a whole reference library of trying out different eye-shapes, and noses, and mouths, and different angles of faces. So that when you're drawing your characters and people again, that you can have these different poses to reference yourself that you've already referenced from real life or photographs that you've tweaked again and made your own. 5. Creative Momentum: I also want to make sure to mention creative momentum, and that's something you're going to build up. I know personally that I have a cycle of creativity that I go through. I will have a period of time during my month that I'm super creative and I just create tons of little collections, and I just want to draw and create a lot. Then after I've done that burst of creativity and art that I wouldn't say get burnt out, but I just like I'm over it for a while so that's why I enjoy teaching. So we'll have something to do in the meantime. For me, taking breaks in between being creative is something that really feeds my creativity. So I'll take a break for maybe a week to do teaching things or administrative staff. Then by that time, I'll miss my creative practice again and I'll do another burst of creativity. It's important to not only work on your creativity and maybe have a sketching practice or sketchbook practice of some sort, or journaling or something like that. It's also very important to take breaks and not push yourself or not force yourself to be creative at all times because that will lead to creative burnout. Being a professional creative or illustrator, artists, surface pattern, designer, anything. Creative burnout is something that you might experience at some time or another. I'm sure it usually has to do with having too much on your schedule, taking on too many projects, too many engagements, too many personal projects that you have put tight deadlines on, and the only solution to that is taking a break and taking it easy or possibly doing something a little bit more light-hearted. I have children, so creating art with them with really cheap supplies and just having fun is really playful, and that always makes me want to create real art. Anyhow, I wanted to talk about how to keep your creativity going. My favorite way is working in collections. That way, when you have come up with an idea, you can reuse it a little bit rather than every piece you have to create a new idea with a collection. I like to work in smaller collections like three to six. That's a great way of using an idea for three pieces or six pieces. Then once you've created your collection with a certain idea, how can you use that, like make another piece and so on and keep the ball rolling? How can you reuse your own ideas? That's hard to explain in words, but I could try to come up with some kind of example, such as if you create a Christmas collection and you create it in a certain way with a certain theme, you built it out in a certain way by having one main illustration, one funny illustration with text, and then a pattern with lots of funny little Santas. How could you reuse that idea in the way that you built up that collection to keep moving? You could do it Easter collection with the same build up in the same way. You could find some Easter funny texts that you can create and then a funny little bunnies doing Easter things like you did, the Santas, and then a full illustration of an Easter basket or whatever, the classic things. That's just the way that you can reuse your own ideas, and it's completely 100 percent okay to plagiarize yourself. That's pretty good. But yeah, I welcome you to reuse your ideas, and try to keep the ball rolling when you are feeling creative, just like keep going, make sure that you record your ideas when you have them. One of those days when you aren't filling as creative, you can look back in one of your crazy ugly sketchbooks and think like, "Oh, I had this idea going for this collection." Then the next one after that, I can do this idea with these same ideas, but just a different theme. Forget when I'm talking about. Just keep that momentum going. Another popular way that people keep the creativity going is with some kind of challenge, and there's tons of online challenges such as 30-day challenges or a 100-day challenges. I've never personally tried a 100-day challenge. I haven't had the time to do that, I haven't prioritized the time to create a challenge like that. But I'm really itching to do that because from what I've heard many other people, many other artists, after they've completed 100 days of doing a certain project or focus, they really worked through an idea and they've developed their skills in such a short amount of time, and that would be an incredible way to push yourself to see an evolution of your work in a relatively short period of time. That's definitely high on my list of something to try. Again, that can be just for yourself, doesn't have to be professional work. It could be 100 days of sketching something. Don't put so much pressure on yourself, it's going to happen. Your creative process is going to build in. This momentum is going to start going when you figure out one idea, and then how do you add onto that? 6. Other Peoples Prompt Lists: Speaking of challenges in prompts, I really want to recommend a couple of amazing artists that create these kinds of prompts for you. If you're having trouble coming up with your own prompts, in the next section, I'll be helping you on how to do that. But in the meantime, if you want to test at some other prompts, these are incredible challenges that are already in place. A couple of our fellow top teachers here on Scotia have great prompts every month, such as Charlie Clements with her hashtag, fun with faces. It's great for anybody who's working on portraits and people, and would like some ideas to create their characters. We also have Shannon McNab with her hashtag, sketch design repeat. She also has a daily sketching practice prompt list so that they're very easy and simple ideas just to get you drawing on paper. The prompts are very easy to digest and simple. Bardot Brush has a, making art every day prompt list, which is also an excellent series. We also have hashtag, 36 days of type if you're interested in hand lettering and would like to test out your letters. Inktober is another one that's very popular and there's many artists that create prompt lists for that. But it also is the original prompt list for inktober. But there's other artists like [inaudible]. She has Peachtober with her 31 days of prompts. It's a classic to use only ink for those, but now it's kind of branched out so that you can use whichever material that you like. For all of our hand letters out there is Homwork by Lauren Hom and she has incredible lists of prompts every week that she also shares her favorite on her huge Instagram feed. She also has a funny prompt maker on her website called wtfshouldIletter. Another classic is illustration Friday, and they come out with one prompt per week that you can work on and share with a huge community of people. I'll make sure to link all of these different prompt lists and artists that you can check those out if you'd like. 7. Make Your Own Prompt Jar: Finally we move onto the section the fun part we're going to get crafty. In this section, I'm going to teach you how to create a jar of your own prompt so that you can create, cultivate, invent your own original ideas. This is going to be really fun. So let's get started. Welcome to my desk it's time to get crafty. Like I mentioned, you're going to need something jar or a container to create this magic prompt maker jar and I have this Mason kind of jar. I've already started out by clipping out a couple of pieces of paper. I have these beautiful origami pages that I have had for like a 100 years, so I thought that I might as well use it for a project one day and so this a great project. I also create a little sticker here with some stickers that I have had for 100 years and I thought that that could be fun detail to add to my jar. So I have just written magic on here now I'm going to add that to my jar. You could use a piece of washi tape or never it's not so important. See if I can get it on their straight. Now it's officially a magic prompt jar. Okay. The first thing I want you to fill it with, I've taken five pieces of paper and I have written my big dreams and plans on them. Just five of them that's good enough, big things that you want to accomplish in your career and you're going to add these to the jar. This is going to be not really a big part of your prompts but it could be, but mainly it's just going to be a clever reminder that sometimes you're going to pick randomly one of these and you'll be reminded of that big, huge dreams that you have, that you want to accomplish and that will give you maybe a little kick in the butt sometimes. So we'll add those five big dreams and plans and those are private and exciting and they're going to every time you open it you're going to be like, "Oh, all right. Yeah. Exactly, that's what I want to work on." It could prompt you to work on that thing with your other prompts but mainly I want to put that in there just as a random fun thing. To keep this all organized because after a while maybe you'll forget what this is, so let's get crafty and nerdy and use our reference library to create a little key. So I've created here my magic prompt maker key and I've created a little clipping of each of these different papers that I'm using. They're all going to have a certain theme that we're going to be recording on them. This is a great way just to reference later before I forget what paper is what. Yeah this is for fun, this is for being super nerdy. So I have my little key here that I can glue in the little pieces that's what the glue stick is for. I've decided that my beautiful blue paper here, I've created a little cut outs of different papers, these beautiful origami papers and they have little like gold on them. Another idea would be wallpaper clippings, if you have any extra wallpaper around or just beautiful other, just something scrap pieces of paper in different colors. Or if you're super crafty you could paint different papers in different colors just to have something special, more than just the white pieces of paper unless you like the white pieces of paper thing. Okay. So I have all my little scraps of beautiful paper and I've done my 10 for some and 20 for others, because they thought that would work out best. To do that she can show you pretty easy, I'm going to use a six by six pieces of paper, six inch by six inch. Just going to simply cut them in half this doesn't have to be precise and then I'm going to cut off inch pieces here. These last little edges I'm going to make sure to save a little piece to glue into my notebook here and to my reference to the library so I remember. There is all my different pieces of paper that I have used to create my different promptness. Then I'll go ahead and I will show you the different categories that I have chosen for myself. We just get organized real quick. Okay. The categories that I created for myself from my prompts because of the way that I like to work and what I like to draw are, of course first my big ideas but that's just for fun to get a nice kick in the pants sometimes. I also have an occasion if I wanted to create for Christmas, or birthday, or summer, or fall, something like that. I have person but feel free to use animal if you prefer to create animal characters or draw animals, or whatever it is that you mainly draw. Then I have a place. I can really think about an a environment that this person is going to be living in. Then I have things, some things to add into this could be accessories like glasses, or a bicycle, or something like that to add into my piece. Then the last thing is some extra flair, and I said that would be fun little details that you could add in, such as abstract shapes, or glitter, or stripes. Or I thought also feelings would be interesting to add into this section to add in love, or happiness, or positivity, your energy, or something like that. So that you have a overall feeling that you would add to the piece. I think that would be something that would be interesting to randomly pick. I'm going to take all my little pieces of paper now and I'm going to write down all of my prompts on them, fold them, and add them to my jar. So I'll speed this up so you don't have to watch me do this because it's quite a few. Like I mentioned I did 10 occasions, 10 people like prompts, 10 places and I did 20 things and 20 extra flair. Let's get started. I want to also mention that I'll keep in the resources section a list of all the prompts that I have used to create my jar. So feel free to use those as a stepping off point to create yours, but I always advise that you try to make it your own with your own prompt so it's really something that you would want to draw. Okay. Here we go. Let's start off with my purple ones. That was my people. I'm just going to take my average archival pen and I'm going to write all my prompts on my little pieces of paper. This is going to be so fun. To give you an idea of my people things, I have chosen blonde, brunette, afro. It's to give qualities of a person that I could work from. I've also thought about themes for the drawing such as diversity, inclusivity, body positivity. This is what I am going to be adding to my person props. That's all my people, done. Now it's time to move on to occasions. Again, some of my ideas for that were Christmas, birthday, things, fall, winter, spring, summer. I also wanted to add something typically feminine stereotypes or masculine stereotypes. If you pull that, then you can make something stereotypically masculine or feminine. It could be interesting to see where that goes. That was my occasions, it's finished. I also want to mention that these prompts are open and free. That's a great way that when you do pick it, it's not too specific so that you can roll with it and work with it. The next one is, let's see, place. This was my beautiful things I thought would be nice. For place, I was thinking could be cozy at home, garden, forest, mountains, beach, or the sea. Desert, jungle, countryside, under the sea, or in the city. That's what I'll be grading on these ones. Next step is paint. I chose these beautiful fan pattern, and this with tiled circles for that. I thought that they match together and be great for our thing prompts. Our things, I've added things such as space or the universe, table, chair, lizard, bike, rain, bugs, rainbow, cat, dog, boat, taco, make-up, sweets, birds, art supplies, stationery supplies, or computer. Just random stuff, but also in around that I like to draw things. You could go really specific or keep it quite open, like the universe or space is quite a large thing. But you can interpret that by just adding a couple stars to your art. Another thing, things like everyday items like a table or chair could be interesting to incorporate in your piece because you're forced to think about how to add that in. Same thing, funny things like a taco, that would be interesting. That could be a print on somebody's shirt or it could be somebody eating a taco. The prompts are all open for interpretation. Let's do this. This is so therapeutic, too, I'd have to say. Just working on these little prompts and adding them to the jar is pretty nice. Last section, the jar is actually getting quite full. It's not going to be so easy to randomly shake that around. I might have to take them out, randomize them, and put them back in. The last section I was saying is the extra flair section. I have these beautiful two pieces of paper. Extra flair I thought was feelings, but also there's just little details that I could add to the artworks, which is calm, energy, happy, positive, fast, slow, funny, peace, love, sadness, glitter, stripes, dots, abstract shapes. Then I thought I even love adding flowers to my work. So I added a couple of flower prompts. So geraniums, poppies, dahlias, peonies, roses, or wild flowers. I'm going to add these to my jar too. 8. Prompt Maker Reveal: Our magic prop jar is complete. It's all full of its beautiful papers, and so many endless possibilities of creative random cool original ideas and they are all your own. Let's see what happens. We could start off with if you wanted to have it a daily drawing practice or little sketching session, not too much pressure, just pick one maybe and see what happens and you can just draw one prompt. That's one way of using this. Let's see what this is. Jungle, there we go. Come up with dots of jungle stuff. If you want to elaborate on that, let's add a second prop to this; jungle with stationery supplies. Could do little flat lay of stationery supplies with jungle theme all over them, like a little mark up of jungle supplies or I could think of a stationary supply collection with a jungle theme. That's how I can build up that, those two ideas with those ideas. Let's add more ideas to the mix. Next one, love. I would have to think about that one, isn't as easy for me but yeah, or could be some jungle animal hugging stationery supplies because they love it so why not, that could be how we can use these three. I think three is a pretty good number to get some interest in using of your prompts. Let's pick another three to start off to see what that would be like this one. See, I like this idea. Let's see what does this one say. Forest, like the jungle. Now we're in the forest instead and it's spring time. Forest in spring where I think about Sweden and all the tiny little beautiful flowers that pop up in all the mass that's in the ground of the forest. Forest here in Sweden, so friendly and beautiful and cute. That would be really fun to draw a scene like that. Let's add one more to that prompt, boat. Forest, spring, and boat. Again, I can see a scene with the edge of a forest on a lake with a boat and that little spring flowers and maybe that's the first time you're taking the boat out to go fishing. I know that sometimes I've seen on walks, there's lots of old boats that people have take your boat out of the water onto a beach or something, and sometimes those boats they're made out of water and they've been there for a long time so I can see that as like a scene with like a ruined little wooden boat and maybe spring flowers are growing out of it. That's something that comes to mind for me. That's two of our three prompts that already that I wouldn't have just sat down to think about that if I was just opening up my sketch book for day. But now all of a sudden I have these. What did I come up with like six different ideas of things that I could draw just with these prompts. This is what is so magical about having these here at ready. We'll do one more collection. Beach for the sea. Somebody, a person with silver or gray hair, that's a cool detail, and then one more is this geraniums. That's an interesting mix because usually you wouldn't see geraniums at the beach. But I could think of it again like maybe a beach house and they put a cute plant pot with geraniums outside and there could be a woman with gray hair sitting on her porch steps, I think that could be interesting scene to draw. There could be some, something that signifies that it's near the beach by having beach stuff like dried starfish, short shells or something like that. That's neat. Just quickly can get so many ideas. If I want to mention something, if you have a trouble, with one of the back words, I suggest that you go to dictionary.com and look up the definition of a word. Sometimes the definitions are built up in a way that it paints the picture for you of what that word is. Sometimes I can find that really helpful to get more words to signify one word so that you can build off of that to create your work, but just test things out. In the project gallery, I will start sketching out these ideas. I'll show you what I come up with. Yeah, but that's how we use the magic prompt jar. Feel free to take as many as you want, or as little as you want to build up your prompts. Another ideas also now that we have the color coded, is that you could fish out certain colors. Like if you see you want to person, here's a purple one. If you want something a little bit more specific, so here's inclusivity. I draw a group of people that signifies inclusivity. Let's see. If I wanted a place that's with the fans that see if I can under here, under the sea. Mask fun. To signify inclusivity under the sea, you could have different fish and things to show that they're different sizes and colors and shapes, and then you add a thing. Could be interesting, rain, rain under the sea. Maybe, I prefer the other ideas but rain could be interesting. We'll see, you add another one. What's this? That's another place, another thing. Fish is not weird. I'm talking about under the sea that fits perfectly. That's obvious. Let's do one more thing just to see if there's something sweets like candy. The inclusive under the sea creature, fish holding different sweets could be random and funny. But yeah, I prefer the first two together. Yeah, that's how I suggest you use this. Create your own prompts, add them in, switch them out on occasion where you start getting the same ones all the time. Have fun, play with this. Sketch it out in rough sketches when you just want to get some ideas out or make final artwork with these ideas might as well, they could become your new favorites. Why not, perfect for your portfolio. 9. Let's Play PEVF: That was really fun, but I thought I wanted to share one more playful exercise with you to create very detailed prompts. That is a play on the classic MASH game. Did you play that when you're growing up? I know when I was growing up in the '90s, that was something that we did all the time because we didn't have touch screens, cell phones to text people with. We actually only hung out together and pass notes, and we played MASH during recess or lunch break or whatever. If you completely have no idea what I'm talking about, MASH was a way that you could predict the future of your life. MASH stands for mansion, apartment, shack, or house so that you're going to figure out which place you'd be living in, and then you'd have a list of all the boys that you like to see, who you're going to marry, and then you could pick a place, what city you'd be living in, and all other details to map out your future life. It was very fun, and then your friends would always force you to have some gross person on your list that you couldn't stand, and that would be funny if you ended up marrying them. It's just like silly, lighthearted, funny things, but I thought we could use that to create prompt list for ourselves. It's going to be really fun. Instead of MASH, I'm calling it PEVF for a portrait, environment, vignette, and full body. You either have to just draw a portrait, environment, or a whole scene. A vignette, a little piece of maybe like a hand or a neck or mouth, from behind a hat, something like that. Or F for full body, which is a full-body scene. That is just a playful way for me to come up with ideas for different portraits and illustrations. I look forward to sharing this with you too. Let's jump into my sketchbook, and I'll show you what that's all about. Welcome to my sketchbook, my resource library, if you will. Then here is my MASH game that I was talking about, or as I call it now, PEVF, which is portrait, environment, vignette, and full body. I'm going to use this to make more pinpointed scene of prompts. That's a little bit more like structured, a little bit more detailed, rather than pulling out nine of prompts from the jar that are quite random. This is a little bit more structured but random. The next sections that you're going to be randomly selecting from, I've chose skin to create different skin tones for different people from very fair to very dark. You have different hair colors from brown, blonde, black, gray, colorful. Again, I leave it up quite open so it will always open to interpretation and can be changed and adapted. However, the story or the illustration becomes. Then we have hairstyle, I thought that'd be fun to prompt short or long, bun braids, a scarf. Main color I thought would be interesting to include so that the entire illustration would have a main color that dominates the illustration. That could be a way of making it more interesting. It shows blue, pink, green, yellow, or purple. Accessories like a hat, glasses, a bag, headphones, jewelry. I thought it could be fun also to include a friend, but this could also be adapted to just use as a extra detail. So bird, dog, cat, bug, or lizard. Again, I can break my own rules, I can either have them having a pet or I could use it as a detail on their clothes or in the background to have like bird wallpaper in the background, or they're wearing a cat shirt. Who knows? Style, I thought would also be interesting, especially if this is a portrait to give an overall style of who this person is, if they are retro, minimal, cute, colorful, or trendy. Then again, if it was to be in an environment, I wanted to have some prompts that help you in that area. Mountains, sea, forest, garden, or desert. It helps you to visualize a place or the person who's in that place. Then a couple of extras I thought would be fun to add in. Like the extra flair for my jar, which is plants, flowers, geometric, stars, a space and fruit and vegetables. Just fun simple prompts that together is going to be most likely interesting and fun to draw. How do we go about finding our MASH up? Let's get out a pencil. You did this with friends so that you'd ask somebody to get a random number or something like that. There's several ways that you can make this your own, but you have to find some random number. Let's think about seven seconds and we're going to do a swirl, and then we're going to count how many rings it has, and that's how many times we're going to randomly select step. This is not very scientific, it's just for fun. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. That's my seven seconds super scientific. How many did this become? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Our lucky number is 16. I'm going to go through each section and you can go through 16 until you get a winner. You can also go through, let me just show you like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I have this as the PEVF if we're going to do that, P-E-V-F. I got full body. You could also do the opposite. So everything, you would cross that off, and then keep going until you get your winner. That's also to make it super exciting. Let's try that too, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So no portraits [inaudible]. We got environment. Onto skin tone, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. No, very fair person. [inaudible] so we got a 10 person in an environment. You could also go through all the things like that as well. You can figure out how you want to do this. Shall we do that for the rest? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. There we have it, went through, is quite time-consuming by snakes like meditative, fun thing to do by preparing for your drawing session and why not? I don't know, it's a fun little exercise. It transports me back to nostalgic '90s time when I was having fun with my friends, and I remember doing this a lot. It's just a fun little exercise, but let's see what I got. I ended up getting an environment, I got a person with a tan, hair color is gray, so gray, there could be like the trendy gray blond hair or gray like an older person, whichever I feel matches more. Hairstyle would be short. That's also open. Could be a woman with short hair, a man with short hair, whatever I want. Main color, pink. Accessories, a bag. A friend, a bug to have in my place. The style is cute. The place is mountain, so this is the environment. I'm going to place this person and then extras were stars in space. So I can already envision this place. Just like a mountain scene with stars in space in the background, like a galaxy background, and then main color is pink. Maybe it could be like a beautiful sunset. So the mountains are pink. Washed in color and then I can place my person in here, and they have a bag so maybe they have like a hiking gear on. They don't necessarily have to be such a huge part of the scene, but just to show somebody who'd been hiking and they're looking out on this beautiful scene, and they have a bag, and maybe some bugs to, I could have some fireflies also in the foreground. I can envision that the person has gray hair, short gray hair, and a cute style. I'm not really sure how to incorporate the cute style, but maybe it could have on the hiking bag, it could be pink, the main color, and could have cute buttons on it or something like that. That's just like what I came up with in this exercise, and I invite you guys to test this out because it's really fun, and to give you a couple more ideas of the sections that you could include. Instead of skin tone, if you don't draw people, you could do animals, of course, you could exchange the people section for animals like a fox, ostrich, elephant, giraffe, or a deer. Another idea would be great, especially for the environment section, but for any of these, would to add in a section for a perspective. So you'd be forced to try out a different perspective than you usually do, and I mean, like the way that you draw the actual artwork, either in bird's eye from below to looking up, isometric, straight ahead or straight on or like a flat play of things. That'll be an interesting idea to add into when you're creating these very detailed random prompts. Whether it could also be something that'll be interesting too, or the seasons or something like that. So those are a couple more ideas, and I hope that you enjoy this little exercise and when you really want to just have fun and play. But I think also this could really add in a fun element, but also, it's a way of pinpointing ideas that are very specific that again, you most likely if you just sat down to your white blank paper, wouldn't necessarily come up with, but when you are fed these ideas and put together in this way, I think that it really feeds your creativity, and my inspiration, and my imagination really starts to envision these places in the ways that I can incorporate these prompts to get there. I think there's something really funny about the randomness of these prompts, and that you can be really playful, and also it's not set in stone. If you pull a prompt that doesn't really resonate with you, you're fully free to just switch it out or try something different. But I think it's the randomness in the way that they comes together in prompt lists like this that really cultivate your creativity, and make these ideas that maybe you wouldn't have thought of come to life, and that is why this is so magical. 10. My Monthly Prompt Lists: I would also like to mention now that I am going to be creating my own monthly prompts using my magic prompt maker jar now. I'll be sharing them on my Instagram, so you can follow along too. I will be having weekly prompts because daily stresses me out and I would love for you to follow along. The hashtag that we will be using is #picketitdrawit which I thought was cute. It hasn't been used on Instagram yet. You can be feel free to use my prompts that I use or using your own prompt jar, I would love if you would share your prompts and what you've created with them using the hashtag as well, and make sure to tag me. You can find me on Instagram, @emmakisstina. That's going to be a really fun way for us to cultivate our community and creativity together. I will of course, always make sure to share tons of your work in my feed as well. It's really going to be fun to see all of the random prompts that you come up with from your magic prompt maker jar, it's so hard to say. Make sure to look out at the beginning of every month, I will be publishing a weekly prompt list for you to check out and be a part of, so that you can have new ideas to work from and build your portfolio with if you find something that really clicks and works with you, or just to cultivate a new drawing practice to have something to share on social media and the community aspect around that, which could be really fun so that we can cultivate our creativity together and pretty much just have lots of fun. 11. Class Project and Thanks for Watching!: We're done. Thanks so much for taking this class with me. I hope that you have found it inspiring and fun and playful and that you're looking forward to creating your own prompt jar, and you're going to be playing my prompt mash game, and for your class project, I hope that you'll enjoy creating your own prompt jar or playing the prompt mash, and then you'll create a original piece of artwork using one of these random prompts that you have created. I look forward to seeing what your randomize system comes up with. So please share that in the project gallery. You are free to create whatever kind of artwork that you would like with these creative prompts. You can either create a fully illustrated final illustration perfect for your portfolio, or you could just show daily sketches that you'll be doing using these prompts that you have made. There's no pressure to create anything incredibly finished or super rendered and perfect. This is about having fun. I really look forward to seeing your work and hearing what your random prompts were. Again, I also want to mention that I will leave all the links to the other artists prompts that you can use in the future, as well as my own prompts that I will be publishing. I've also created a list with all of the prompts that I use to create my jar if you want to use that as a starting point to work from. Again, thanks so much for taking this class with me. If you haven't already make sure that you press the "Follow" button here on Skillshare, so you never miss out when I publish another class. You can also check out all the other classes that I have available already about creative business such as pricing and contracts and also other career classes about working in Procreate or creating patterns. You can always find me on Instagram @emmakisstina or at my website, emmakisstina.com. I also have a private Facebook group for like-minded creatives that you can get to know me better and we talk about all the ins and outs of working in this beautiful creative field, and it's a really open, creative, happy place. I welcome you to join their team.