Spawning Ideas

"For me, ideas stream through my head at a frantic pace. I feel like a bear trying to grab a salmon. If my paw misses its target, that salmon is gone for good. I don't dwell on it. I just lunge for the next salmon."

   Went trolling through Scott Adam's blog archives on an unrelated quest (great insight on the above image's "self-plagiarism" in his original post) and came across his interesting analogy re: the creative process and coming up with ideas. There will be an upcoming post where I confess to actually drawing a panel - all the way through penciling, inking, scanning, cleaning up and digitally shading - two times withing a couple weeks. Same idea off the same doodle in the sketchbook, but no idea that I'd already drawn it until after uploading the image into archives, and only then upon noticing the duplicate file.

   I can relate to Adam's metaphor just a little bit more by extending it to another, similar sight familiar to most Alaskans: birds scavenging on the dead, washed-up carcasses of spawned-out ideas.
   Well, makes for excellent fertilizer at any rate.

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” - David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity