Thinking inside the box!

I know, I know... people think it’s SO much better to think outside the box, but a lot can be said about thinking inside the box as well. Being creative while staying within the constraints placed upon you (whether by yourself or by someone else) can really get your imagination flowing!

Think about this: how many times have you started at a blank piece of paper or an empty computer screen and been at a loss of where to start? By narrowing down your starting point, you are getting a leg up on this “creative anxiety”.

This is a great little creative excercise I learned in art school. First, draw a series of shapes (in this case it’s a box) on a piece of paper. The box doesn’t have to be pretty, in fact, it’s better if it’s not. I drew the box in Adobe Illustrator using the pencil tool with the stroke at 15% cyan and copied it and pasted it so that I had nine of them on one sheet. I printed it out then started drawing.

The challenge is to fit the character to that particular shape. Some of the examples below are of people at the restaurant where I was having lunch while others are just out of my head. Sometimes, the character just falls into place (which in my opinion defeats the whole purpose of an excercise). Any good excercise forces you to work, to think. We are not just “going through the motions” when we draw, we are examining our process and getting creative.

The shapes will force you to change the way you would normally draw a character and give you some great alternatives for designs. You can even take this a step farther and draw a variety of different shapes on one page (circles, ovals, triangles, heart shapes, bean shapes, etc...) and pick a character from your original sheet and draw that character multiple times using different shapes and proportions.

Have fun drawing...now get in that box!