Keep the Creative Flow

A tireless tip, for endless ideas anywhere!

Yesterday I was at a Christmas party. While most adults were socializing, I had to get my books ready for their Amazon release. Last step -- my cartoon illustrations.

I had everything I needed. My portable Mac Air, my Wacom tablet and dedication! Too bad I left my stylus in my other bag I was thinking of to bringing with me. See, never second-guess yourself.

That left me in a rut. But what did I do - something else creative, that would make give my childlike drawings a steadier hand. Okay, that's probably a little dramatic, all I'm saying is that I wrote another book.

Mind you "Prissy Little Chloe" is mostly a cartoon per-paragraph, while the other is full a cartoon novel. So I'm really only halfway done. But I wrote it! (I started it in February, so I really only wrote maybe ten pages.)

But it's done!

Lesson here, when you get frustrated enough you'll find something else to do.

No, that's not it.

It's to keep the creative flow by getting inspired -- listening to music, playing some music (or what somewhat resembles "sound"), drawing, cooking (not for me) -- anything right-brained.

A good gauge for me is if it feels brainless, it's good.

It really does keep you engaged on your project and makes all these ideas profuse, that much more seamlessly.

Comments

Review of the Alienware Graphics Amplifier

Laptop VS Desktop? Have both. What is a "graphics amplifier"? In essence an external GPU you can plug right into your system. Many companies have tried to release these onto the market, but sadly many haven't gotten past announcement phase. Users either resort to painstakingly building custom external graphics cards with components purchased all over the web or simply tossing aside their laptop and building a $10000 gaming PC for their graphics power needs. Both are acceptable, but Alienware and Razor (or any other company to announce one aain) give you another option: a mini-tower outfitted with a build-in PSU and cooling fan for your graphics power needs. Easier and More Flexible Wouldn't it be great to bring your laptop to work, coming back to your home office 2 hours later and gaming away as if it were that $10000 desktop? What a versatile workstation! No stray red, black and yellow cables sticking out of a shoebox or melted G...

Creating Action Scenes for Concept Art

Creating Action Scenes Concept Art Tutorial After wrapping up my first fanart series on NieR:Automata ( catch it right here ), I would like to start a new walk-through series right here, on how I create action scenes for entertainment art. So, let's jump into it! Step 1: Reference and Thumbnails To start building a reference board, I use a free app called PureRef; it allows you to take any reference images that you like, and lay them out in an organized collage. One thing to keep in mind when creating thumbnails, is it’s best to get as many ideas as you can down on paper. Don't be intimidated by that! There are no wrong ideas and it doesn't matter if it looks rudimentary at this stage. When creating thumbnail sketches, think of what you want to see as the main focus of the scene; so, in this case, I want to have the main character 2B slashing a large machine – something inspired by an in-game screenshot. Now, with a rough sketch of b...

Time Manipulation in Game Design

Time Manipulation in Games Introduction The gameplay mechanic that I wish I had come up with first, is Time Manipulation. This is includes the concept of time dilation and the reversal of time in games. Implementing the Manipulation of Time Time manipulation is a robust mechanic. It involves non-exploitable time manipulation, with the goal of being fast and smooth, while not computationally-taxing on memory or hardware resources. The best way to implement this mechanic can be seen in Braid - an indie platform and puzzle game, developed by Number None, Inc. In this game, the world state is recorded for every frame, where the data is stored and compressed. With the recorded frames, any changing entities are extracted and mixed into the final state, which can be manipulated or rewound by the player. The player’s position is recorded and other properties such as color and rotation are stored as an integer that can be reconstructed, along with time information taken fro...

Prissy Little Chloe

Search This Blog