Creative exercise: Inspired by nature’s marks

I described this exercise in my post Fire-up your imagination. Our bathroom is tiled with stones, which bear a few interesting marks. I took a picture of these marks and worked with the first one.

And this is the cartoon monster that the first mark inspired me to draw.

The pink monster in our bathroom - by Benoit Philippe.

(Copyright 2012 - Benoit Philippe)

I worked with tracing paper. After that, I scanned the image and added colours and textures with Photoshop Elements.

The interest of the exercise is the randomness of the initial shape triggering a design that is different to one I would have created without any constraint. It is an interesting thought that nature can help us to be creative in many ways.


Related resources

Fire-up your imagination is one of the the 17 exercises in my free eBook “Creative Exercises for Artists and Everyone Else”. Check it out on this page if you haven’t read it yet.