Create a Mood board with inspirational pictures

Mood boards are collections of images that inspire you, and the work you want to do, and the mood you want to create in your home. Concept boards inspires the film industry to thrive harder.

The best way to create a mood board is to start with Pinterest.com. Create an account and find images that inspire you in any or all of these categories:
Home: colours, patterns, furniture, art, accessories
Lifestyle: fashion, food, travel destinations
Work: anything pertaining to your work/life balance and your passions

If your own ideas aren’t inspiring enough, look at others’ mood boards on Pinterest for ideas.

Use Pinterest with color palettes to come up with ideas

When I want to find a color palette, I use Pinterest. I always think that’s funny because it’s not an obvious place to look for colors. But it works well. It has so many pictures of so many different things, each with multiple color palettes.
You can also use it to generate ideas about how colors work together. See what colors are used in the same room, or the same outfit, or the same picture of an outdoor landscape and try to figure out why they worked (or didn’t).

You can also use Pinterest as a sort of mood board: put pictures of things you like and see what colors you decide you like best with them.

Plan your story boards with key words

The way to plan your storyboards is to make a list of the phrases you will use in the comic, and underline the key words.

You can use “key words” that are obvious story points, or you can use “key words” that are images. For example, if you are writing a comic about a guy who builds a robot dog, one possible key word would be “robot.” Another might be “dog.” A third could be “dog-like.”

The more key words you have, the more flexible your comic will be. You can always change your mind about which direction you want to go in. The point is not to have a perfect plan, but to have enough flexibility so that if an unexpected opportunity presents itself in the middle of drawing the comic, you’ll still be able to take advantage of it.

Listen to music to generate emotions ranging from anxious to playful

The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. We aren’t consciously aware of most of the patterns we match, but they affect us all the same.
The brain pays particular attention to music. That’s because it has a specialized role: to make emotions. Evolution built it to make emotions, and the way it does that is by matching patterns of sound to patterns of emotional response.

There are only a few basic emotional responses, and there are only a few basic patterns in music. A few notes can trigger one of these responses, more notes can trigger a different one, and any combination can trigger yet a third. Or no combination will, if the listener isn’t in the right mood.

Make collages of inspiring artworks

Make a collage of inspirational works of art. For example, one that emphasizes the importance of education. The collage might be a literal work of art or just a visual representation. The collage can be as large as you want.
The inspiration for this exercise is Pablo Picasso’s quote: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”