Drawing Tutorial: 5 basic exercises for generating ideas

Awaken your creativity with the techniques that illustrator Javirroyo recommends to trigger inspiration

We all have creativity, it's just a matter of knowing how to detonate it. Drawing, for example, requires specific mental processes to synthesize, visualize and translate into other languages the ideas that go through our head, and having tools and techniques to convert them into schemes and drawings is a basic part of this type of projects.

Javirroyo, illustrator, designer and teacher, believes that it is essential to train the muscles of inspiration, so today he shares with you 5 basic exercises that will help you not only to generate ideas, but also to represent them and awaken your creativity. Discover them in the following tutorial!

1. Connections

Think about specific topics. Javirroyo, for example, choose happiness. Then, you will have to work on diagrams; the first one consists of two circles that join. What you should do is place the concept you are working on in the center, and then think of additional concepts that relate to it. In this case, for example, Javirroyo has chosen happiness and love. In this way, you have created a connection that relates your initial concept with two extras that can guide you to generate a concrete idea.

2. Lifeline

For this exercise, Javirroyo has chosen the millennial's job as the theme. What you have to do is to mark on a timeline the high and low milestones that this topic could have. In this case, Javirroyo has considered points such as finding or losing a job, so that a graph is generated that simply and visually represents a long and complex process.

3. The pyramid

This time, the chosen theme will be stress. Draw a pyramid and think of all the things you link to that concept. Then, place each idea you have thought of inside the pyramid, starting at the base. Start with what causes you the least stress and work your way up as the stressors become more intense.

4. The fortune cookie

For this technique, the theme will be sex. Imagine opening a fortune cookie and think about the context of the topic. Then, write the first thing that comes to your mind inside the fortune cookie paper. You will discover ideas that you have unconsciously living in your mind and find inspiration.

5. Chance

Open an internet search engine and type the first part of a sentence, for example "How to get...". Find out what searches the search engine suggests to you by default and choose the one that catches your attention the most. Then, draw the scene that comes to your mind to represent that search.

If you liked this tutorial and want to learn how to work your creativity through drawings and schemes, and acquire tools that will inspire you in all your projects, do not miss his course Creativity techniques: a gym of ideas to draw.

You may also be interested in:

- 10 tips to improve your creative routine in 2022.
- 4 basic watercolor painting exercises for beginners.
- 10 easy ideas to start sketching
-5 online courses to learn how to draw animals from scratch.