Show Me a Story: How to Make Concepts for Your Artwork

An exercise for beginners

Digital sketch by Erika Jungman | City Jaguar

Tell Me One of Your Biggest Fears

As an artist, what do you fear most?

The blank page?

Perhaps you’ve watched hours of videos with titles shouting promises of 10 tips for getting ideas for your art. Or maybe you’ve asked for advice from a friend who made it to art school. Did you Google for answers?

Reading, museum-going, watching documentaries, long walks in the woods, and pulling from life are solid sources for ideas.

Don’t forget to write them down when you get them in the shower…

Is Finding Ideas the Real Problem?

If you’ve been learning how to make pictures from your favorite YouTube artist, you might find yourself intimidated (or awed) by how rapidly many of those artists will create a thematic image, seemingly off the top of their heads.

Most, if not all, are working from project plans: written concepts, briefings, manuscripts, research, pre-made components, and photo-references. They may “just be riffing” on “something,” but they’ve been going over that “something” in their minds for a while before they put it down for you to watch.

I think we all have plenty of ideas in our heads. We just don’t think of most of those pieces of information we store as ideas, because they’re passing moments in the day. Or because we worry that the idea isn’t good enough.

For the most part, “I have no ideas,” and “I can’t come up with anything,” is code for “I don’t know how to organize all the information in my head right now.”

What Is a Concept Supposed to Do?

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was make beautiful and amazing pictures of dragons, princesses in fancy dresses, and unicorns. Going into my second year at art school, I chose illustration for my major because it was the closest thing to what I was already doing.

I thought I would just be making more pretty pictures. The illustration department had other plans. Its teachers spent more time on concept development than anything else.

A good illustration is an image that summarizes whatever it accompanies (music, stories, political opinions, etc.), in some cases, without giving away the ending.

Here’s a chart that shows how your concept fits alongside all the other parts of image making.

Writing Your Pictures

A few months ago I started writing down my concepts before making sketches. This was a new approach that flew in the face of everything I was taught in school.

Back in art school, we students would make sketches, then a finished illustration. We would tack it all on the wall and talk about what was good or bad, and what should be improved.

I never had a teacher who showed me how to write up a brief, analyze a story, or simply just take notes. The standard practice was to think the idea up, then draw it as thumbnails and sketches. Writing was for authors and reporters.

After writing one-to-three sentence descriptions for half a year, I feel my ability to come up with ideas has greatly improved. I’m not spending hours in front of a blank page or screen wondering what to draw. My concepts are more organized, which makes developing the remaining areas of picture-making go more smoothly.

And, most importantly, when I actually need to come up with an idea for a picture, I know how best to start working on it. I start with this exercise.

The Assignment

This exercise will help you practice writing down ideas on demand.

You’ll pick out 4 random words according to a structure I outline below, and then write a 1-3 sentence description around them for a picture. Each description is a concept. Write each one as if you’re describing a scene to someone who can’t see.

• Try the exercise for 5 days
• Keep your exercise sessions short (up to 15 minutes per day)
• Try to write between 3–5 concepts per session
• Keep your concepts simple; don’t overthink them
• Keep your work in one place so that you can assess all of it after your 5 days are over

There are 4 components to pick words for:

• Who: Character, animal, and/or Object
• What: Activity/comparison/message
• Where: Environment/place/setting
• Climax: The most important moment

TIP: Dramatic pictures are best served when they depict the moment just before or just after the climax of the story.

Materials Needed

A journal, sketchbook, or text editor

The Ground Rules

1. To choose the words for each of the 4 components that I outlined: Pull random words from books, magazines, dictionaries/thesaurus, stream of consciousness, what you see around you, etc. Make concepts from both logical and nonsensical word mixes.
2. Write multiple descriptions, 1 to 3 sentences each, using the words you picked out: See how many different concepts you can come up with. Don’t get hung up on quality or length — you’re not writing War & Peace. Think about the behavior, use, or societal attributes of these words and work them into the concept. This is your time to think about what you’re saying (think of sketching as focusing on how to say something)
3. Spend up to 15 minutes per day on this: Adjust your time frame to your attention span. Quitting after you make the “perfect” concept of the day is perfectly OK. Use a session timing that will keep you engaged (for example, if 10 minutes is more your speed, then 10 minutes is the max you spend on this).
4. Doing this exercise for 5 days: “5 days” is meant to give you a collection of work that you can assess at the end for improvements, struggles, etc. It’s an achievable amount of time (if you do this 15 minutes per day, for 5 days, then you’ve lost an hour and 15 minutes from your life). You could do this for less (or more) than 5 days — it’s your choice. It’s an experiment, after all.
5. Don’t think about whether or not you can successfully draw or paint these concepts: This exercise is not about making beautiful/finished pictures. The purpose of it is to focus your mind on putting ideas on paper in written format. Focus on story-telling, symbolism, message. Keep this enjoyable or you won’t learn or make any improvements (nobody likes chores — we all end up ditching them sooner rather than later)

An Example of the Exercise

Here’s an example of how I do this exercise on my own time, along with a brief recount of how I came up with it.

Concept:

Who: A jaguar, tourists

What: Site seeing

Where: A city

Climax: Encountering wildlife

A jaguar is hiding among the leaves of a tree planted on a city sidewalk. A small group of tourists looking at a map stands near the tree. A man, separated from the group, discovers long scratch marks on the tree trunk and calls to his fellow tourists to have a look.

How I came up with this: I pulled the words from a magazine that I had lying around. Quickly going through my head I remembered a documentary a few years ago that mentioned that jaguars are known for leaving distinctive scratch marks on tree trunks in the jungle. I could have easily gone for the car, but I went with the big cat because of my memory. I lived in a big city for many years, and that word “city” probably brought up recollections of tourists asking me for directions.

I spent roughly 2 minutes writing that description. This is a “think fast” exercise for me; I pick the words and go for it, without knowing where I’ll end up, or worrying if I’ll have anything to show for it.

The Last Word

Don’t worry about writing great, good, or bad concepts.

Any concept can become a better concept through the act of refinement.