How Do We Think of Ideas?

In this session, Kris introduced the aspect of idea management, and how we all creatively think. I can see the relevance of this session to the idea production stages of our new brief, and I can see how it will help us to further evolve ideas and display the techniques too.
She asked us to think up an imaginative way to explain where ideas come from, without thinking about the response. "Where do ideas come from? Go!"
Our favourite responses:

1. Ideas grow on trees
2. They come from sniffing shoe polish
3. They're from the clouds, they rain down on us.

In addition to this, we were given a large range of objects which we then had to produce and create our own instruments with. I produced a strange percussion instrument using a tube of masking tapes, drawing pins and mixed shaped lego. This produced a nice clunking type noise, which was easy to make a good instrument with.

I feel that this task really challenged us and pushed us out of our comfort zones, yet at the same time developed the idea of creation and what actually spurs our imagination individually.

Due to it being an impromptu task, we were told to develop our instruments further in our own time. I have decided I'd like to further develop some alternate ways of controlling the notes that the instrument makes instead of a simple percussion instrument.

Using additional items found at home:

• 
  Empty box
• Hair Grips
• Tin Foil
• Rice

I used these to make a rattling and yet melodic instrument which showed further development of ideas and how timescale allows us to develop further creations.

The whole idea of our session was to encourage and develop the idea of using coincidences of ideas and creations to produce ideas. For example the idea of using thumbprints as a basis to a drawing was suggested through artists and other creations, I decided to further explore this technique in my sketchbook. Such coincidences can be used in such tasks such as the 'Exquisite Corpse' activity we explored. I have previously explored this task before, where each person draws an alternate section of the body, but I'd like to further delve into this further. As well as doing the activity with people in my class, I chose to do some of my own with other students from the Illustration Degree outside of University.

Jake Chapman Exquisite Corpse Collection

Jake Chapman is an artist who was inspired by the exquisite corpse technique, and used alternate body parts to represent his way of thinking and his ideas incorporated into his very distinctive creatures of alternate varieties.  The way in which it works is the paper is folded in order to keep the creature underneath as a surprise, meaning that the creature featured is an alternate variety of features and legs, body etc.
The fact is that the activity is fun with it refraining from boundaries, as they can choose to present creatures, people and other objects.