Generating & Researching Ideas: Sketchbook, Influence, Sources
- Use a sketchbook to generate quantity before committing to a direction
- Research artists for strategy and method rather than copying imagery
- Build your own visual source material to feed an original inquiry
The sketchbook is an idea engine, not a gallery
The most common beginner error is treating a sketchbook as a place for finished-looking drawings. Its real job is volume and thinking: thumbnails, crops, color tests, half-ideas, notes about what a piece is for, annotations on why something failed. Work in quantity first — fifteen quick thumbnails at postcard size will surface a better composition than one careful drawing, because you cannot judge an idea until you can compare it to alternatives. Write on the page: what I was trying, what happened, what I would change. Those written notes become the raw material for your written evidence months later, and the pages themselves are where your practice and experimentation actually live before they show up in finished work.
Researching artists: take the method, not the image
Artist research is required intellectual work in this course, and it is also where students most often drift into copying. The distinction is between influence and appropriation of imagery. Influence means you study how an artist solves a problem — how a printmaker builds up registered layers, how a painter groups an entire picture into three values, how a photographer uses a shallow depth of field to isolate — and then apply that strategy to your own subject. Copying means lifting their composition, subject, or image and re-executing it. A useful research habit: for every artist you look at, write one sentence naming the specific operation you are borrowing ("she erases and redraws over the same sheet so earlier states stay visible") and one sentence on how you will apply it to your material. If you cannot name the operation, you are looking at pictures, not researching.
A personal question beats a generic theme — and needs your own sources
Generic themes ("identity," "nature," "mental health") are attractive because they sound serious, but they are shared by thousands of portfolios and they do not tell you what to make. A personal question — grounded in something you have actually seen, done, or noticed — supplies both specificity and endless material: a particular kitchen, a commute, a family archive, a hobby, a place being demolished near you. Personal questions also solve a practical problem: they generate visual sources you own. Take your own reference photographs, collect the actual objects, draw from life, keep the receipts and letters and screenshots. Original source material makes your work harder to mistake for anyone else, keeps you clear of academic-integrity trouble, and lets you photograph the same subject again when an experiment demands a new angle — which a borrowed internet image never lets you do.
A student says: "My Sustained Investigation is about identity." Walk them from that generic theme to a personal question with sources they own.
- 1.Refuse the abstraction and ask for a concrete instance: whose identity, seen where? The student mentions that their grandmother speaks a language they only half understand, so family conversations arrive as partial meaning.
- 2.Find the visual problem inside the personal fact: half-understood speech is partial legibility — something present but not fully readable. That is something you can do to an image.
- 3.Phrase it as a question about making, not about feelings: How can text and image be made partly legible — obscured, overprinted, fragmented — so the viewer receives only part of the meaning?
- 4.Plan sources the student owns: photograph the grandmother’s handwriting and household objects, record and transcribe fragments of conversation, shoot their own portraits rather than pulling faces from the internet.
- 5.Name the artist research as a method, not a look: study a printmaker who overprints layers to bury text, and borrow that operation (overprinting to reduce legibility) rather than that artist’s imagery.
Keep a dedicated sources page in the sketchbook: every reference photo you did not take, every artist whose method you borrowed, with a note on what you used it for. It takes seconds per entry, it makes your citations trivial to write at submission time, and it forces you to notice when a piece is leaning too hard on someone else’s image.
A student admires a photographer who shoots empty interiors in flat, even window light. Which use of that research is appropriate artist research rather than copying?
Building an investigation out of images saved from social feeds is a trap in two directions: those pictures belong to someone else (an integrity problem), and you cannot re-shoot them when an experiment needs a different angle, light, or crop (a practical dead end). Generate your own visual sources early — a folder of your own photographs is the single most useful asset for a year-long investigation.
Why is generating your own reference photographs and drawings especially valuable for a Sustained Investigation?
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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