The Art Of Inspiration

Living City by standoutloud

There is a question that I seem to get asked quite a lot that I really hate. The question is where do you get your inspiration / ideas from ? I internally shudder everytime, for two reasons.

Firstly, inspiration is a fickle and random beast. There is no one source. It is everywhere, everything and at times, nowhere at all. People expect a nice easy answer as to where and there just isn't one.

The second reason is that my artworks are based around really simple ideas. Artists tend to have these long winded explanations about themes and meanings. I am not in that catergory.

Take the image at the top of this post for example. I was watching a tv show that said a city was like a living organism, ever growing and changing. I really liked that sentiment and set out to put the idea of a living city into the form of an image. Thats it. I also titled it, not very imaginatively, Living City.

Another example is my Gizmo Ipad case design. That came about from a conversation with a friend. After mentioning that zazzle was now offering custom Ipad and Iphone cases, he asked "what is an Ipad for anyway ?" After much discussion we decided that neither of us knew just what it was actually for. His closing comment was "Guess it is just another gizmo" That cracked me up, so I decided to do a design around that sentence.

Steam Punk Gizmo by standoutloud

There really is nothing special or magical about it. Some things come along that I think are great ideas, so I work on them. I actually wrote a squidoo lens about this topic a while back. Examining Inspiration If you want to know more feel free to check it out.