Where do you get your best ideas from?

[thomassayle]

Probably reading other comics or thinking about my sad sad life and exaggerating it till its funny.

[Stinahhh]

My life. And my imagination because I daydream of scenarios that will never happen irl. At least I can make it happen in my comic trololol oh gawd I need a life.

[futureboundentertain]

Intense burning hatred for a movie, comic, game, or other work of art.

There are few bad ideas, and any idea canwork well... if somethingd oes not work well, if a work of art sucks... then it has failed to use its concept well.

Take for example... Raiders of Atlantis, inetresting concepts, terrible movie. I would take that concept, the idea of a lost world of myth having devolved into a psot apocalyptic state of being, and I would turn it into something good.

(I have never done this with Raiders of Atlantis, I am just explaining how my thought process tends too work)

[phen]

Aside from personal experiences with friends and other people I work/go to school with, I'm prone to coming up with ideas and story designs while driving. I'm in a car A LOT of the time so I've conditioned myself to go into brainstorming mode while on the road, hah^^

[Arach]

Music is usually what sets off a lot of my ideas for storylines! Mostly because I listen to music everywhere I go so that mixed in with my surroundings and personal experience and just the world around me really brings out the best of my creativity!!

But my really good ones always come from late nights where I'm half-asleep (sometimes pumped with coffee) and not really aware of what I'm doing, I just type away at my computer.

[alaingrey]

Like Arach, I definitely feed off music. I have a spotify where I pretty meticulously make playlists for series, characters, settings, story arcs... Sometimes they tend to be a lot of the same things so I delete them but it helps me organize my thoughts and try and be coherent and focused on what I'm trying to say.

.... Also, not to condone bad habits but I think a bottle of wine with a cigar or some green gets me into the same frame of mind as most my comic characters and lets me write their dialogue a lot better :'D

[jmhenry]

Mostly from either sleeping or day dreams. Sometimes I'm just working on something and an idea for a comic pops in immediately. I wouldn't say all of them are winners though...

[SirHellsir]

Dreams, personal experiences, anecdotes from other people (non comic artists, so they would go to waste if I don't use them).
While walking and no-brainer activities, also on the shower.
And sometimes a new song will create a full scene on my mind.

[sarrowsmith10]

My writer and I both work in a lab. So for our comic VSEPR, alot of the story comes from real life lab experiences. With a dramatic super hero flare of course. So, if there is something going on at work that strikes us as funny or adventurous, its shows up in the comic.

The writer for the comic I illustrate Goblins of Razard gets her inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen and dark fairy tales. That and a mix of DnD games I suspect.

[TristanJensen]

I think this pretty much sums it up for me XD

[shazzbaa]

I'm similar to @futureboundentertain, except for me it's not UGH I HATE THIS but just mediocre stuff/fun stuff that I enjoyed but wanted more out of. Ideas that were fine but didn't go where I wanted them to go, or concepts that I want to see filled out in a different direction.

Weird deconstructions or reinterpretations of existing properties will also give me ideas -- someone talks about how you could easily interpret Disney's Aladdin as an unpleasant vizier trying desperately to protect the kingdom from a con-man, and I love that! We have the beats of the story there to interpret -- Disney's Aladdin -- but that story isn't really there. I want to make that story now!

Also D&D characters, but let's be real, most of my D&D characters are just me wanting to take an archetype I've seen somewhere of a character that never gets to be the protagonist, and play out their story, so it's kinda the same thing. I want the story I allllllllmost got somewhere else, but not quite.

[Aspie_Gamer]

I think this pretty much sums it up for me XD
http://forums.tapastic.com/uploads/default/28725/8adea4199c2c9ca6.png

Lol. I can definitely relate with good ol Calvin there. I was a smart kid in school just like him. I simply didn't feel like doing my homework (until the last minute) is all. Many a school night, I would forgo doing my homework in favor of playing something on my Nintendo GameCube or later my Wii/PlayStation 3. Even now what with me having my own responsibilities as a young adult, I still feel like goofing off sometimes instead of drawing new pages for my comic.

[SpavVy]

When I'm in bed comfortable and falling asleep but half the time I tend to forget it the next morning. Some ideas come from dreams too. One of my main antagonists early designs was based off of a sleep paralysis episode.

[Sanz]

while i'm driving lol. I talk to myself.

[Kayke]

SAME! I talk to myself while driving to work and have so many good ideas that way!

[successkid2014]

I usually get most of my ideas from gaming or my real life. There will be moments in time when I see something funny or interesting and I begin imagining what could be behind that thing that caught my eye. For example, "6:30 PM" and "On the House," two one-off comics I plan to work on, were inspired by certain people I see during my life. "6:30 PM" was inspired by a young woman I saw working as a librarian who looked absolutely MISERABLE. And "On the House" was inspired by a baby-faced bartender who looked like the biggest sweetheart. The bar wasn't like a normal bar or a more happy bar, no, this bar was notorious for bikers and even gang members to hang out in. He didn't match his environment and I began to think of a story for him.

So basically, my ideas come from what I see and who I meet in my life.

[mappypaint]

When I get angry at something, this comic of mine gets updated. I'll feel fine after making a strip of it. As for the ideas of where it came from, it's probably from the depths of my silly brain.XD

[noctuidae]

tossing and turning in the middle of the night until eventually getting up and scribbling on post-it notes stuck to the closet in a sleepy, frustrated stupor works pretty well for me. although its worth noting that i used that strategy to plot a majority of my comic, which i restarted halfway through chapter 2, so, uh, be sure to edit when you're rested.

i've also gotten ideas for characters from anecdotes my friends and family have told me, as well as reading poetry. looking at street photography is pretty good for settings.

and of course, from reading other stories.

[Aloredd]

random stuff. I can be reading a book (or comic), listening to music, sleeping (based a few stories off of my dreams), images on google, pictures in books, talking to my sister, watching my pets, reading a quote, etc....I write lots of stories (because I can't draw, sadly)...and take inspiration from everything

[AnnaLandin]

They just... turn up whenever.

Sometimes, there's an intention behind it all - like, I pitched a 14-page oneshot to the Beyond 2 anthology a few weeks back, and when coming up with that one, I sat down with the list of rules (has to contain a LGBTQ+ character/theme, has to be either post apocalyptic or urban fantasy, certain scenarios are not allowed, etc.) and tried to come up with something that a.) followed the rules, and b.) was something I'd enjoy drawing. I picked themes I like (in this case, people who feel anxious/uncertain, unlikely friendships, cute use of magic, domesticity, etc.), and built the story around that.

Sometimes, it literally just turns up. I'm one of those people who can't really draw random things - if I put pen to paper and draw anything more complicated than hands (referencing my own for practise), that thing WILL turn into a story. If I draw a person, they get a story. My brain just picks them up and runs with it. I can come up with an entire personality, backstory and plot in between sketching in the right eyebrow and the left.

Grassblades started as "hm, I really like wandering samurai stories, I should do one of those some day" and then I ended up with this unwieldy monstrosity of a story that is going to take me years to finish.

I had a 24 hour comic turn into a 168-page graphic novel once.

It's like my brain is constantly picking things up and shaking them until ideas fall out. Sometimes, it's other stories that spark ideas for my own - sometimes it's music. Sometimes, it's a walk in the woods. Sometimes they just materialise out of thin air.

And I tell stories constantly. Like, some people sing in the shower. Me? I tell stories.