April Sketch-A-Day Creative Challenge

Few things can invigorate the senses and inspire the mind like a change in the seasons. Spring is here, and with it the pursuit of fresh artistic innovation. We’ve blogged about ways different creative professionals find inspiration in the past, but this time I wanted to offer up my own methods in a very personal way. I’ve made the personal commitment to make at least one sketch a day to get the creative juices flowing. It may be pencil, pen, or even software-based (i.e.: Photoshop) – the artistic medium is unimportant. It’s the source of the inspiration I’m after. Read on…

Few things can invigorate the senses and inspire the mind like a change in the seasons. Spring is here, and with it the pursuit of fresh artistic innovation. We’ve blogged about ways different creative professionals find inspiration in the past, but this time I wanted to offer up my own methods in a very personal way. I’ve made the personal commitment to make at least one sketch a day to get the creative juices flowing. It may be pencil, pen, or even software-based (i.e.: Photoshop) – the artistic medium is unimportant. It’s the source of the inspiration I’m after.

For each sketch submitted I’m gonna try to outline the mental process that went behind it, namely, the Why, Where, When, Who, and Why.

I extend this challenge to my readers, also! Make a sketch a day, no matter how basic, and describe the inspiration behind it. There’s a thread in our forums where members may submit any of their own daily sketches. Being a family-friendly site, no pornographic or suggestive material please, and you must have the rights to any submitted media (no ripped pics, for instance).

• Submit your own daily sketches here

To kick this off I submit the following:

I made this little bugger in Corel PainterX using a Wacom Graphics 6×8” tablet. It all started with the Divine Proportion Tool – a kind of compositional guide based off a Fibonacci sequence and resembling a spiral. Staring at that guide I started with an eye, then an arm, then those big funky lips. I guess the principle inspiration was James Rollins’ book Ice Hunt, which I had just finished reading, in which an ancient killer-whale like critter is found in the arctic. My critter is siginificantly different than what he described in the book, but it served as the mental image that evolved into this guy.