Even if you have practiced how to get your creative juices flowing, sometimes you need a little inspiration to get a nudge in the right direction. I realize this is not true for everyone. Maybe you want to keep your brain free from outside stimuli in order to be truly creative, but I am so far beyond that stage that I don’t care anymore. I love browsing through inspirational artwork to get ideas for new LEGO MOCs!
Artwork by John Wallin Liberto
Have you ever stumbled across an image or artwork that you found very inspirational? And then some days later, when you want to look at it again, you can’t find it and you can’t remember how you found it in the first place? Or maybe you take screenshots of things you like, and then you have to scroll through years of photos of cats and birthday parties just to find that single image again?
Sound familiar? How do you go about finding inspirational artwork, then? And how do you categorize it and store it in a structured manner? I don’t have the definitive answer, but in this article, I will guide you through my tips and experiences including one key site: Pinterest.
Finding Out What You Like
Once Upon a time …Space
I’m nearly 50 years old, so I’ve had a lot of time thinking about what I like and why. As a kid, I knew I liked shapes and forms almost as much as a good story. One of my first contacts with science fiction and design was a French animated series on TV called “Once Upon a Time… Space.” I think I was six years old when it aired, and I was so completely hooked.
I can’t remember anything about the story, but what stuck with me were the locations and the spaceships. As a kid, I had no idea who the artist was, but as an adult, I have of course figured out that a lot of the artwork was drawn by the French artist Philippe Bouchet (a.k.a. Manchu).
Around this time was also when I first discovered Star Wars. Before I ever saw any of the movies, I already loved Star Wars because of the designs of the spaceships and creatures. Star Wars was just present everywhere, on the back of comic magazines, on pencil cases, backpacks, cereal, and so on.
And honestly… if Star Wars had looked more like Flash Gordon, I would probably not have cared about it. What I mean is that if Star Wars hadn’t had that successful team creating the production design, the whole concept of Star Wars would have failed. This is something I have concluded much later, of course.
And so began my lifelong hunt for more artwork and designs to fill my ever-growing hunger for inspiration. Over the years, I have struck gold from time to time (Blade Runner, Aliens, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow, Chris Foss, John Berkey, and Homeworld are some examples), and I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about my discoveries.
I’ve bought a lot of books and magazines, but everything became easier in the early nineties when the internet was made broadly available. That was about 30 years ago, and the amount of artwork available for everyone today is several orders of magnitude more than it was back then. There are so many incredibly talented artists out there, and I’m still discovering new artwork that fills me with awe every week.
Practice
My first advice to figure out what inspires you would be to just sit down with a pen and a paper and write down the things that fill you with wonder and awe. It can be video games, comics or movies. Doesn’t matter.
The next task will be to search for which artists were involved in the production. Try to find those artists’ personal web pages or see if you can find them on Artstation. See if their other work resonates with you.
Remember the ones you like, maybe create a bookmark. Or even, as I do sometimes when I find an artist I like, download their artwork and store it in a folder structure on your hard drive. (I do this very rarely, only when I discover something that I don’t ever want to lose.)
Finding Similar Artwork
Ok, so now you know what you like. Now you can start following artists you like on various platforms like Artstation, Facebook or Instagram. But you want more inspiration? Let me introduce you to Pinterest.
Pinterest is a free online service that lets you create “moodboards” that you can share with others. You can follow other people and look at their boards. You save images to your different boards, thus creating an ever-growing collection of ideas and inspiration. Pinterest is available as a website and an app.
The best thing about Pinterest, however, is that it uses an algorithm to analyze what images you pin to your boards, and will then suggest new images that you might like based on that. The first thing you should do is to create a board for what you are looking for. I have many boards that I use for my own personal categorization. Like mechs, spaceships, locations, tech and so on. But just start with one thing that you like for now. My example for this article will be “dragons.” I have 13 boards right now, and I think you need to have five to ten boards to start seeing the true potential.
Click your profile, here you can view and edit your boards.
When you create a board you can choose whether it should be available for others or private. I have all mine marked as private.
When you start out, Pinterest will not know anything about what you like, so start adding about ten images of dragons that you like to your board. You now have a base for Pinterest to grow on.
Here is an example of what a new board can look like.
If you return to your home feed and refresh, there should now be a lot more dragons in the artwork suggested to you.
Trimming Your Feed
As you might soon discover, Pinterest will suggest artwork or styles that you really don’t like, or outright hate. Now is where you actually need to start doing some work. Click on the three dots, choose “hide pin” and then choose “not relevant to me”. When I started using Pinterest I did this several times a week for a very long time. Slowly you will start getting better suggestions.
Another thing you should do is to keep adding more images to your boards and create more boards. The more images Pinterest has to work with, the better the suggestions will be.
Click “save” to add an image to your board.
Choose the board you want to add the image to.
You should also use the feed trimming feature in the settings from time to time. (Click the hexagonal nut in the lower left corner, then choose “Home feed tuner.”) Here you can decide what artwork Pinterest should use to give you suggestions:
Activity: Here you see all the images you’ve clicked on (viewed) on Pinterest. Scroll down your viewing history and remove images that you don’t want Pinterest to care about. Use this feature often in the beginning.
Interests: I’ve never used this. It might be good if you want to look up ideas for interior design or something similar. When you sign up for Pinterest, you will have to choose five interests. Now can be a good time to remove them, if you don’t feel that they are relevant to you.
Boards: Here you can decide that some boards should not be used for suggestions. I use this for temporary boards when I gather inspiration for certain projects that I don’t want messing up my feed. Enable the new dragon board you created.
Following: Here you see a list of people you follow. All of their saved and published pins will show up in your feed.
Fill Up Your Boards
Now you can start adding artwork that you like to your boards. In my example, I now have three fantasy-themed boards:
In your home feed, you should now have multiple images of dragons showing up. In the top left corner of the image you will get a suggestion on which board Pinterest thinks you will want to save it to. If that is correct, just click save. If you want to add the image to another board, just click on the suggestion and change to the preferred board, then click “save.”
A Word of Warning
Whenever you find artwork that you like on some other site, you should search Pinterest to see if you can find that artwork there. But don’t upload artwork to Pinterest if you don’t own the rights to use it! It is probably safe to assume it is not the artists themselves who added their art to Pinterest, but you should not contribute by adding stuff that isn’t yours.
Also, you should never take screenshots of other people’s artwork, or save other people’s art on your device, and then upload those images to Pinterest yourself! That is a clear case of copyright infringement, and you should totally avoid it. Some artists have reasons for not wanting to be on Pinterest.
Remember to credit the creator
If you create a MOC that is completely, or heavily, based upon artwork you’ve found online, I think we should all remember to give credit to the original creator:
You should mention the original creator when you post images of your MOC, and if possible, you should link to the original artwork.
You should also link to the artist’s Instagram or Artstation account (or other platforms that are relevant to them).
If you can’t find the original artist or the site it has been copied from, use Google Image Search and see if you can find it that way. The original artwork is most often posted on the artists’ private website or Artstation.
Here above, to the left you can see my MOC and on the right is the artwork I used as reference. Below you can see that I have linked to the original artwork on artstation and also linked to the artists Instagram-account.
This will be your gesture of gratitude to the person who spent many hours creating that piece of art that triggered your imagination and inspiration.
Dilution by AI
AI-generated content has started to show up more frequently everywhere, including Pinterest where AI-generated content is frequently popping up. Some people like it, others don’t. I have not figured out a way to filter out AI-generated content, but I haven’t really tried that hard either.
The creators of Pinterest can not be held responsible for what kind of images people add to the platform. It is still a great tool even if there is a lot of content you don’t want to see, but we know how to fix that: You will just have to learn how to trim your feed. If you don’t want to see AI-generated content, remove those suggestions if you find any by marking them as not relevant. After a while, Pinterest will learn that you don’t want to see it.
Conclusion
There is a ton of amazing artwork for inspiration out there to find. Sometimes you come across blogs or websites that try to aggregate the best artwork. The problem with those is that the artwork is picked by someone. You will be depending on the tastes of the editor.
With services like Pinterest, you will never run out of inspirational artwork, and the more you tune it the better it will be. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I use the app/site frequently and add/remove artwork all the time. This makes my suggestions more in line with my current tastes, and so far it has been a huge source of inspiration for me for LEGO building and beyond.
Did you find this article useful? Are you using some other similar tool? Please let us know in the comments below!
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