ITAP Week 2 Development of creative thought and structure in Illustration and Graphic Art

Overcoming mindsets is a deliberate thinking strategy to free you from the practice of solving everyday problems. In order to do this you need to break your natural way of thinking and move away from comfort zones freeing your mind to look at alternatives away from your normal conventional approach to problems. To do this I would start by questioning my traditional way of thinking by asking things like, what if? And why not? Also, by trying to go in with an open mind and not having any assumptions about the problem. Christoph Niemann is a graphic illustrator who comes up with very good simple visual ideas, which are fun and interesting to look at. Such as, his images of the toaster with bread popping out in different ways and the one with a god throwing lightening at a man, who catches it and throws back DNA. His work shows a non-conventional approach to things because the image is not something you would normally think of doing in association with the theme, for example the one with the person peaking though the fingers is talking about even with eyes covered theirs always someone peeking.

Developing ideational fluency is producing ideas that fulfill a requirement. Ideational fluency is the number of ideas to solve a problem rather then the quality of the ideas that you come up with. It’s all about getting ideas down on a page using methods such as mind maps and classification. I use mind mapping to get down my ideas because I find it an easy way to see all my ideas at the same time. It also, enables me to link some together as well as, going into more detail about my ideas for one thing branching off from the original thought. Such as, for the current magazine project, an initial idea was the history of Birmingham, which then led me to landmarks, which then linked back to another idea I had about culture in Birmingham. To help me think I have things around me in my room that I like and find interesting and they help give me ideas spontaneously. I find this works because things that inspire me surround me and I can draw inspiration from them.