It’s not always easy to think of ideas to draw. I get many ideas when I’m bored or nothing else is happening, like when I am driving a straight stretch of road in my car. But sometimes I don’t have boring stretches of life anymore - I keep pretty busy with my art practice and my baby. Sometimes I am so out of ideas that I do yet another self portrait. I promise I’m not self-obsessed, there’s just no one else around, and I’ve ushered all the magazines with models in them out of my place in an effort to Kon Mari what is within my power, while an asteroid belt of Fisher Price toys encircles my studio area.
This is why I personally need a low-stakes prompt factory. One of my favorite things about hanging out with little kids is they have unbridled prompting, they ask me “Draw a ninja bee! Draw a unicorn surfing!” and it’s so much fun because I don’t remember what it’s like to come up with random ideas like that in .5 seconds. I like to think of myself as someone who is overflowing with ideas, but it isn’t always true.
To make prompting more random and easy, I created a prompt jar lately. Here is how I did it. I made two sheets of red words representing objects and places, and one sheet of style or themes in green words.
From there, I cut out all the words and put the word strips in a jar. The goal is to draw at least two red strips and one green one, and illustrate that. The first prompt I drew from the jar was: Door, Supernova, 1990s music video.
I was really happy with this prompt! Going forward, prompt-jarring won’t be a bad way to do warmups unless I have something specific to warm up on. I’ll post drawings I make from the jar as I get more prompts created.