How to build creativity?

I've been learning to draw using Line of Action for two years now. While my practice drawings have improved a lot, I've produced only a few original sketches. I just don't feel inspired to draw from imagination, even though I don't want to be stuck doing studies forever. It seems I don't have much of a "visual imagination". Does anyone have any advice or excercises to help build this skill?

Hi Retrodictionary,

When you sit down to draw from your imagination, how do you go about that?

I find it's extremely hard to just sit and wait for inspiration to hit me, I don't think it really works that way for most artists and it's an unreliable method of creating. You might want to consider finding a theme and maybe creating a moodboard for it. (That means collecting a bunch of pictures related to your theme and creating a collage that shows these things together on a single board/picture.)

You can use this moodboard to create a new drawing that is based on what you chose. For example, you can collect images of certain clothes and bodytypes and then draw various models that fit these themes, but instead of recreating a reference you're creating your own.

I think if you do this regularly, you can train your brain to create new concepts from source materials in your environment (or even relying on your memory) and then 'create from scratch'.

It's probably best to let go of the idea that all original work has to come into existence from literally nothing. Art exists because we see the world in a certain way and then create based on that. Nobody ever creates something from absolutely nothing, it's always traced back from a source. Unlearning this is probably the hardest part for me and many others.

I would say,draw what you like/inspires you and get a lot of overall experience from studying and the go play with it from memory directly after practice.

Also a cool practice is drawing an object and turning it into something else. An example is when i was drawing a vaccum clean but saw an alien sitting in a space ship so I drew that instead.

I believe creativity will come as long as you keep practicing fearlessly and activly.Sometimes it takes 10,000 failures before you reach success.

Best wishes,hope this helped.

The reason I bother to keep doing figure drawings is because I have story ideas and I genuinely can’t write very well without doing some drawing to get through the hard parts. Blocking out fight scenes. Diagrams of a set. Costume ideas that in my head are vague but if I draw them they come to life. None of it is fancy or “finished” but I can’t make the story happen without drawing. And most of the hard parts are peopley so figures help.

It’s not about being inspired. For most stuff I have written it’s closer to a comics script than anything else. I have a giant pile of ideas. Ideas aren’t the problem. Organizing them, executing them, doing all the “boring” stuff that feels like filler...

I will say that for me, feeling like a frame I have planned is boring is a sure sign I don’t know how to draw something that it calls for.

In short, inspiration lies.