general and special theories of creativity

What inspires artistic creativity? What knowledge of the world around you do you need to have to build a solid foundation for your imagination? How can you revive your creativity when you are having an artistic dry spell?

Visual Magic Magazine caught up with Rodney L'Ongnion and Angus McIntyre, two artists well known for both humor and common sense to get their insights into these questions.

Rodney L'Ongnion has worked in the design and production of advanced computer imaged artwork, animation sequences, and special effects for Print Media, Broadcast Video, and Cinefilm. He is probably most widely known as the animation producer of the video movie Planetary Traveler.

VMM: Besides the obvious art classes, what other type of educational back ground do you feel is important for an artist to be able to draw on?
RKL: My recent 3-D work has been mainly in Bryce but this would be true for any good modeling program. It helps to understand geologic and environmental processes. Bryce creates worlds by simulating the natural laws that created ours. If you know HOW a telescope works, you can build a completely functional telescope in Bryce. Someone did and the darn thing not only magnified distant objects but it bent the light so that the objects were offset just as they would have been in a "real" telescope.

In designing scenes I've called upon memories and researched subjects as varied as plate tectonics, cloud formation, lens aberrations, multi star planetary dynamics like the ones postulated for Alpha Centauri, liquid dynamics and the motion of the volumes that create waves and swells, volcanic caldera and catastrophism such as the eruption of Thera 3500 years ago and the architectural changes brought about by the erasure of Cretan dominance of trade routes resulting from the destruction of Knossos by the ensuing tidal wave.

Actually, all those examples are from the musings and researches I called upon for ONE scene, "Vulcan Dawn", which shows the sunrise over an ancient temple of the pre-Sarak warlords of Vulcan's distant past. For the insights into a pallellism of special development that my scene is based on I reread "Spock's World", an interesting novel of Vulcan political intrigue set in the time of the original Star Trek.

What I mean is that the more varied and intense your education, the more wide-ranging will be your interests, the more easily you will assimilate new concepts, and the greater will be the palette you bring to Bryce or to any other medium.

I've heard it said that the measure of an artist is the amount of information not presented in the final artwork. A great novel is built upon the thousands of pages of background, history, and biography the author could have written that went into the development of the characters and scene. A great statue reaches across time to us because the sculptor had mentally carved each possible moment in time before and after the one he captured in stone. A great painting..... ah well, you got the idea.


Angus McIntyre claims to be a researcher in linguistics and artificial intelligence but that is just something to kill time when he isn't creating art, designing websites and engaging in the practice of journalism and creative writing.

VMM: From time to time, all of us reach a point where we find ourselves sitting in from of our computers just staring at the screens unable to start anything. What sources of inspiration do you look to when you hit an artistic "dry spell"?
AM: I'm familiar with the situation you describe. Sometimes you know you *want* to make a new image, but nothing suggests itself.

I'd have said there were two possible approaches to scene creation, which you could call 'top-down' and 'bottom-up'.

Top-down is when you start from an idea for an image you want to make. When I was younger, I used to read a lot of SF, and many of the images I've made have started from my attempts to model particular scenes in favourite books. This is often a good starting point - think of a scene in a book that's made an impression on you, and try to model that scene.

Once you've got going, you can either try to complete that scene as you imagined it, or you can simply let the mood take you and see which way the scene develops. I favour science-fiction or fantasy, because it gives you more leeway, but any favourite novel could do as well. The images in, say "Wuthering Heights", are as intense as anything in science-fiction.

Examples/ideas:

If you haven't read any of those books, think of one you have read, or invent your own story. Invent a fragment of dialog or action. Imagine a title, and invent a story and an image to go with it:

Examples/ideas:

It's fun trying to reproduce other images in your modeling program. Art galleries are good for this, but so too are adverts, rock-videos, and films.

Examples/ideas:

As anyone who's visited my site will know, I get a lot of ideas from rock songs (or poems) and the images they suggest to me. The richer the visual imagery, the better.

Examples/ideas:

"The game is old and tried and venerable.
It's a game that prevails and a game that kills.
It's a game of ministers and generals.
And it's a game My Lady plays with skill ..."
["My Lady's Games", Blyth Power]

"Oh, to paint her eyes so red and her lips so blue.
Raise her likeness on the mast. Caroline four-five-two.
When they come to call for her, I will be there too.
Observe ... radio silence ..."
["Radio Silence", Thomas Dolby]

"I've seen battle fields white with human ivory.
Noble dukes and princes stripped of flesh and finery.
When the crows have done their work, they say it's the time for me."
Sam Jones deliver them bones."
["Sam Jones", Richard Thompson]

"Seagull pilots flown from nowhere - try and touch one.
Death grinning like a scarecrow - Flying Dutchman.
As she slips in on the full tide and the harbourmaster yells.
All hands vanish with the captain. No one left, and the tale to tell."
["Flying Dutchman", Jethro Tull]

Choose a song that means something to you, or, better, one that evokes a particularly strong visual image.

Or start from a photograph. Here (on my website, needless to say) are some possible starting points:

One of the most beautiful buildings I know is the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain. This great mosque with its forests of pillars and arches was built by the Moors before their expulsion from Andalusia in 1492. I started out by trying simply to reproduce the Mezquita as I remembered it (helped by photographs). As I worked on the scene, I became more interested in capturing the 'feel' rather than the precise look of the building. I added mist, played around with the lighting, suppressed the complex marble textures I'd been using entirely. The final result was this image, which bears little resemblance to the photographs, but which I was pleased with nonetheless. The Poser figure was added in to make the image more interesting and add a little mystery to the scene.

image01

image02
That hasn't exhausted the 'top-down' possibilities, but an equally satisfying approach is to start small by working on a detail of your scene and then building up from there. Use your paint program to produce a 2D PICT texture, make a bump map to go with it, apply it to a shape, and see where it takes you. Use PhotoShop (or equivalent) filters to noodle a basic design into something interesting.

Or you can make up a texture in the Deep Texture Editor. Personally, I find this harder, as most of what I do in the DTE comes out looking unusable whereas 2D PICTs seem to give surprisingly good results. There are almost endless possibilities in simply producing geometric designs and then using them to drive either transparency or bump.

Look at historical artifacts for inspiration. Try reproducing something based on Arabic/Moorish-style tiles, or mudejar stucco. Steal science-fantasy hieroglyphoid patterns from the cover of your favourite heavy metal album.

Or noodle with the sky/fog editor until you get something you like, and then build a scene under it.

Or start by modeling an object. What can you do with booleans? Could you make a classical or non-classical column and, if so, what kind of structure would it belong to? Make a whole building - a Mayan step pyramid, a Greek temple, the spiral enclosures of Great Zimbabwe, a German schloss, a lighthouse, a Saturn V launchpad and gantry, a 'nodding donkey' oil pump, a dam, a bridge, a wayside chapel ...The possibilities are endless.


Contacts
Rodney L'Ongnion
rkieth@4u2c-us.com
www.4u2c-us.com

Angus McIntyre
angus@pobox.com
pobox.com/~angus/OtherWorlds/


Linda Ewing is Staff Editor of Visual Magic Magazine, and founder of Digital Duck Prodcutions. She can be reached by email at linda@visualmagic.awn.com and has a homepage at www.geocities.com/~kvack/.


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