It is pretty common for me, on the first day of a college art
class, to ask students to take a few minutes and draw a man on a bicycle with
an umbrella. I can’t remember where this idea came from. But I can remember
that in about a dozen years of doing this that almost every one of my students have
ended up drawing a stick figure riding a stick bicycle, facing right, and
holding a vertical, open umbrella. One or two students in each class have the
man facing left and once every couple years, someone will have a closed
umbrella. One, count it, ONE time (about eight years ago) someone did draw with
a view from the front, but that was only after the first sketch of the right
facing cyclist.
I have yet to see a drawing of a circus clown standing on
the bicycle seat and balancing with a tiny polka dotted umbrella or an angry
young man jumping up and down on a broken heap of a bike while beating it with an
umbrella. In fact, I’ve never seen anything
interesting come from this challenge.
That’s the point. I want students to recognize that the
first idea that pops into their head, is the first idea that pops in to pretty
much everyone else’s head too.
Being original means we must dig a little deeper. Think a
little harder.
Last summer, I decided to offer a mini assignment with a greater possibility for creativity. I asked my graduate students to draw “Halloween” then waited to see how many witches, goblins, black cats, skeletons, ghosts,
mummies, zombies, vampires, spiders, haunted houses, cemeteries, ravens,
headless horsemen, werewolves, and trick-or-treaters would be represented. The results were
similar to the “man on the bike with an umbrella” assignment in the shocking
lack of variety. Every student drew a jack-o-lantern. Two of them finished
early and managed to add a Pac Man style ghost to the right of their
jack-o-lantern.
After these experiments, most students promise that they
will try harder to “think outside the box.” I tell them that they can start by
not using the cliché “think outside the box.”
Apple says to “Think Different.”
Chanel goes a step beyond thinking by telling us to “Be unexpected.”
Sign a urinal. Paint a green stripe down your wife’s
nose. Place daisies at the tips of
your mustache. Except don’t. All of those things have been done by men who
lived a century ago and had a reason to do them. But do look beyond the obvious and find ways to happily surprise your readers,
friends, clients, or workshop attendees.
After the Halloween exercise I went home and made my own
image of Halloween. Yes, there are skeletons in my painting. Yes, one is
carving a triangle-eyed jack-o-lantern but the other is breaking holiday
barriers. He’s dying eggs.
This image won 1st place at last weeks SCBWI Southern Breeze
Annual Illustration Contest last week.
I love the exercise of bouncing ideas around. For "dodge" I thought of a Dodge (car), a game of dodgeball, a Dodge playing dodgeball... and within a few seconds, I was asking myself questions about what kind of things could be thrown at each other besides balls. I settled on a snowman and the headless horseman from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow hurling and dodging each other's make-shift heads. "Map" can just be a map, while also being a topographical landscape to be explored.
