How I Paint From Imagination

Well, I thought that I’d talk about painting from imagination today and walk you thought some of my thought processes when I do this.

Whilst some artists on the internet discourage painting and/or drawing from imagination and it’s one of the more difficult ways to make art – often requiring twice the effort for art that looks half as good – it’s something I have a lot of experience with (since I’ve been doing this regularly since 2012).

Yes, all of this practice probably came from a misconception that it was the “standard” way that artists make art (it isn’t) or a misunderstanding of what it is to “be original”. But, despite rediscovering fan art last year and also occasionally making things like still life paintings, going through phases of making paintings based on photos I’ve taken, drawing/painting self-portraits using a mirror etc… It is still something I seem to do a lot even if, the day before writing this article, it felt like a pointless and arduous chore.

But then, about half an hour before preparing this article back in mid-January, I got lucky and made a surprisingly good semi-digital painting from imagination 🙂 Here’s a full-size preview:

This is a full-size preview. The semi-digital painting should hopefully “officially” be posted here in early-mid May next year.

Whilst I occasionally know what I’m going to draw or paint before I start, this was one of the… many… occasions where I found myself staring at a blank sketchbook page with no idea what to paint. Sometimes I remedy this by just drawing a random shape with a 4H pencil and then just extrapolating from there but, for this one, I realised that it had been a couple of days since I made a “vintage fashion” style painting. So this was a starting point.

I sketched the outline of a head and lines for the character’s neck, shoulders and hips. As I started sketching the outline of a calf-length sleeveless dress – long enough to be “vintage” but short enough to be “practical” – I had my first moment of inspiration.

This inspiration was more of an overall mood than just an image. The feeling of watching a grainy old film from the 1970s/80s, showing a lady trudging through marshland near a farm on a grey day. A feeling that she was happy living there, that she enjoyed this place. Hints of the “cottagecore” aesthetic, but British and gloomier. The overall mood and context of this, distilled into a single emotion.

Given the weather and terrain, I decided to layer a turtleneck under the dress and give her a pair of Wellington boots. This looked “early-mid 1990s”, so I added a scribbled floral pattern to the dress. Then there was the rest of the character to design. For her hair, I went for a single plait laid over the shoulder, not only because I like this hairstyle but also because – from the right angle – it would cover one of the character’s eyes, sneakily avoiding the risk of misaligned eyes. Yes, I’ve drawn this hairstyle numerous times before and it isn’t that creative for me but, if it looks good then it looks good.

But then there was the matter of the pose and this was where the painting started to take on its own aesthetic. I could just draw the character standing there but that would look boring, so I drew her leaning on a shovel with one hand. This added a hint of visual storytelling. Was she just doing gardening or was she burying a body? As for her other hand, I’d originally just planned to draw her holding a jar of tadpoles, a “messy” outdoor activity which seemed to fit in with the mood of the original idea. But this seemed boring so I fell back to my usual trick of making the character hold a light source instead.

I decided to go for glowing green slime – it’s easy to paint – and the whole painting just “clicked” for me in that moment. The 1990s! Random 1990s childhood memories of Jill Murphy’s “The Worst Witch” books, 1990s children’s TV shows and/or toy adverts with slime and gunge in them, those weird curved trees in “Doom II” (1994), 1990s-inspired Gloryhammer album covers, this 1993 Formaldehyde Blues Train comedy-horror music video (warning – flicker, comedic gory violence etc…), early 1990s gothic horror fiction by Poppy Z. Brite etc…

Suddenly the whole mood and aesthetic of the painting clicked into place. It coalesced into a single beautifully contradictory mood which could guide me. Witchy, but radioactive. Innocent, but edgy. Gothic, but “cosy”. Old-fashioned, but “Whoa! Radical! To the extreme!“.

Green and purple was the perfect colour scheme for this mood. With hints of blue/pink as well. And dark brown for the trees and a tiny hint of red for the character’s hair scrunchie. Contrasting, complementary colours.

To fill in the space in the background, I decided to add a glowing pink moon to the sky – often I do this sort of thing digitally (there’s a brush in GIMP, the “Chalk 03” brush, which literally looks like a moon…) but I decided to do it traditionally this time. And, after adding shading traditionally, scanning the painting for saturation adjustments, digital airbrush effects/shading etc… it was done.

This process probably varies from artist to artist. But, for me at least, painting from imagination can often be a process of trial and error, of randomness and discovery. Sometimes, there are familiar personal tricks or motifs you can fall back on to help you out with the process (like the theme of “vintage fashion”, like the hairstyle and like “someone holding a glowing object”). You’ll often end up taking inspiration from other stuff but, because you’re just using your imagination, it’ll often be a more creative mixture of inspirations.

Again, painting from imagination isn’t for every artist. It’s difficult, you have to learn or figure out a whole armoury of techniques to deal with uninspired days (because feeling uninspired is more of an issue than if you’re making fan art, painting from life, painting from reference etc…) and you also have to figure out everything yourself – often relying on whatever art theory, mixture of inspirations etc… you have. It’s “hard mode”. But, sometimes, you can actually end up making good art without a single reference image or anything like that and it’s totally worth it 🙂

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂