Sadly, due to the new GPSR regulations, I can no longer post items to Northern Ireland and the EU. Any orders from either destination will be cancelled with my deepest apologies. I am very sorry and am working to find solutions.
Sometimes I have difficulty deciding what to paint. Now, being a wildlife artist, the choice of subjects is a little bit more limited than if I was a more general artist (the thought of having to decide on subject matter if I was a general artists makes my head spin - millions of choices to make!) Still, there are times where deciding what to paint uses up more of my creative time than I would like. Recently, however, I discovered 'drawing idea generators' online. Oh, how I praised the genius who came up with that idea!
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An idea!
That was until I discovered that a lot of subject matter was unrelated to my skill set. Sadly I do not usually feel like drawing a 'clown in a space ship' or a 'shark tap dancing'. So I had a rethink. If a computer programme could come up with some random suggestions, why couldn't I? Instead of waiting until I needed an idea, I could make a list of animals, habitats and elements like grasses, plant matter and nests, print them, cut them out and put them in a jar, envelope or bag to randomly pick when I needed an idea. I could include foods, colours, body parts and any other small details in the list to extend the idea pool. Totally low tech and easy to do.
A little designing
After a little brain storming to recall British wild animals and their habitats, I used Affinity Designer to produce my list. Animals were done in one colour, habitats in another and landscapes in a third - but you could use coloured pen and paper or any word processing app to do the same kind of thing. I wanted to use different colours for each type of illustration in order to keep each area separate when I needed an idea for a specific topic. Half an hour later I had a handful of colourful ideas and the promise of no more wasted idea time.
You can either put all the suggestions in a bag, envelope or jar and randomly pick 3 (which means you may end up with three from the same group - which isn't necessarily helpful) or put each suggestion type in separate groups on your table and randomly pluck one from each set. You can even pull a single idea and draw it on its own. Below is a selection of sketches made after my first use of the idea generator. The words I pulled were 'red squirrel', 'wider landscape' and 'ford' (a shallow water crossing, not a car - although maybe I should have tried that too).
