Which do you use when creating characters, settings, ideas? Do you paint or draw your stories? your characters? do you draw maps? visually design worlds or universes? or do you just imagine it and paint it with words? I find sketching things helps me describe my ideas because i have visual cues.
Mind's eye is like intuition. Your regular eye would be problem solving or decision making based on what you see and expect.
I find myself drawing picture after picture of characters. I know my readers won't get all of these details, but we should always know more than we present. Drawing helps me make them tangible. I can design and redesign them as I imagine them. I'm not very good with drawing landscapes, so I usually avoid them. (I draw what I can visualize.) However, I will draw some scenes now and again. As for universes and maps and such, I tried, but it only helped so much because the story was evolving away from there. I think if you create a map as you explore your world it might help you concretize a few things for your revision.
I like visuals. I'm a crap artist. I've seen your stuff @Lae, and not in a million lifetimes could I draw to the quality that you do. I'm great at manipulating and repurposing found visuals or drawing maps with GIMP. I'm pretty good at the map thing.
How much detail do you go into with your character drawings? It helps me arrange my ideas and make connections i might not have made if it was all in my head. For example i had a character that was a posh, snobbish type rich guy, when drawing him i included every characteristic that i could think of that would represent his attributes and stereotypical aspects of what we think a rich snob might look like. I then put a similar idea of someone who had a high ranking military family with years of service, well respected etc I used both the drawings to put something together and tried to describe that in my story. It was a bit overkill but it helped. thanks for the compliment i really like those story board things, is that the same as the photomanipulation stuff people do on photoshop? sort of like taking a photo or a few different photos and blending them/editing to change the theme. Does that help you when you're describing something or trying to get a feel for the atmosphere? The "Meg's" one has a good feeling to it, nice, warm and cosy inn.
Yeah, pretty much. When I'm planning a scene out, I peruse the net for pictures and pluck ones that say something to me or that feel the way I want the scene to feel and then I use a program for making comics called Comic Life to make those groupings of images. It's got a great number of filters to soften the reality out of photo-real images. I find that the images are better when they're more amorphous, more dreamlike.
@Lae I am not a great artist, but I ad as much detail as I can. I think of it as taking photos for later. Imagine you're scouting locations and taking pictures that you may or may not need. Now imagine your scouting your locations and characters with your inner eye and using your hands to draw those "photographs." The detail brings life out of the visuals in a way that I don't quite see in simple sketches. I use simple sketches when I'm trying to conceptualize scenes that aren't as important or that I haven't fully visualized.
Ive just had a peek at Pinterest, looks interesting. Could be quite useful in the future. My partner is planning the wedding so i'm sure she'll make use of it.
I've been quite active on deviantArt for some years, so that's my go-to for visual inspiration. I have a massive file with all kinds of pictures, places (hotel rooms, mansions, train stations etc), people (modern women, period women, soldiers, etc etc), objects, mythical creatures and the list goes on. I mainly use it in early stages to visualise and get some description down, then my imagination takes over. I have a very important scene in my mind's eye, and I was thinking about trying a photomanipulation but really, I'd love to draw it. I just have no talent for drawing.
I draw my characters, too. It's fun and inspiring. I'm not good at it, so sometimes it's frustrating when I don't get it quite the way I see it with my mind's eye, but it feels like to me a part of the writing process is to draw them, the kind of clothes they wear, their weapons etc.
I do the same thing with @KaTrian. We draw our characters, their outfits, hairstyles etc, sometimes even the equipment they usually carry, be it backpacks, weaponry, armor, or whatever. Mostly I do it because it's fun, but having the pictures near the computer screen while writing also helps me remember the important details and how they might affect certain things. We don't draw landscapes, but we do draw maps when we need to, like when the location's layout isn't clear to us. It might be the map of a world, country, town, building, or ship or whatever, and sometimes we do story boards, battle plans etc. just to see if there are angles to a scene we haven't considered. It's a bit easier to e.g. think about different battle tactics if you see the area and representations of the participants on paper / on the screen, it helps with visualization.
Ah so i'm definitely not the only one that does it. I thought it might be because I've always been more of a visual person, i prefer to learn and remember by seeing rather than reading. i figured that might be a coping mechanism from the dyslexia but now I might have to reconsider. Seems its more common that i thought Lewdog, think ya may have misread the original question
The images and base descriptions I get while doing my initial research. Many of my books are historical, so it isn't hard to find the right stuff. Clips from films and TV shows, esp. documentaries are good too. SF is harder, but there is still a lot of stuff to be found, especially on the technical side of things. The rest I do in my mind. I'm very good a visualising. I almost have a mental set of video clips by the time I start writing.
Ooh, ooh! I draw my characters, or at least I try to, but that's not going to help me for the visual novel engine that I had just downloaded, and I'm still learning about how to make it work. I never did learn to draw landscapes, though, just basic, derp-tastic overworld maps, but now that I'm writing about a ruined city... an overworld map isn't going to help me much.
I keep my worlds locked away in my mind palace. But, sometimes they are pictured as globes or maps there. I do, however, occasionally draw things. What I do most often, though, is find pictures which are either similar visually or give off a certain mood I want in the story. I sometimes base characters off of real people, so I keep files with pictures to bring back my feeling of that person. Other times I want to convey a mood, so I think about things that make me feel that certain mood and I keep pictures of them to bring it back when I want to write.
