I was contributing to a forum thread about “creative process” and writing about how I usually come up with image ideas. It occurred to me to post that here.

Some visual workers seem to get their ideas in a series, where one image leads directly to the next.

My images, even those that fit in a series don’t ”evolve” like that. So, these workers have a creative process which is emerging from inside their image series to then drive new work to become part of that series. My images are more like an “assignment” or “challenge” I give myself from outside my previous work. Maybe I like to organize my ideas as “projects’ in response to an “assignment” because of my experiences at school and in engineering disciplines.

One way I generate or organize my ideas about science fiction image with figures in them is by a loose science fiction scenario I invented about 2 sisters who are raised on Earth, but end up on a long voyage together to start a homestead on a distant colony world. 

Here’s an example
With me, an art piece starts with both intellectual and visual ideas/urges. I had this idea/urge for an image based on the idea of “Taking your kids to your workplace”. At the same time, I was thinking of that visual/cultural icon or archetype of a visitor and a prisoner at a jail visitor’s room – holding their hands up together on each side of a glass partition in greeting. And I was also entertaining this visual idea/urge about that fresco on the Cistine Chapel ceiling of the hand of God (but with the 2 bodies in a more idealized, flowing “S” shape in my mind). {See, Art History does pay off!}

So I had these 3 ideas/urges swimming around in my head and started applying my “Colony Sisters” organizing principle to them, to see what would pop up in my mind. What I came up with was the idea that one of the sisters would be part of a space station crew and the other sister would be visiting her from Earth. To get the “S” shaped composition of 2 bodies, I imagined that they would be in null gravity and I could therefore arrange their bodies pretty much however I wanted. To get the hands through glass gesture, I imagined that the visit was a surprise and therefore the crew member sister happened to be on EVA (“space walking”) and they would communicate through a porthole.

Those thoughts, and applying the “Colony Sister” framework to them, crystallized the project to a visually composable level, so I made a couple of pencil sketches and started the 3D modeling. Below is the result: