Art Ideas for Inspiration: Illustrating Similes & Metaphors

Video Transcript

"Another way I have thought about putting visual ideas together is actually going back to your old grammar school days when you were taught about similes and metaphors. And this is like this, comparing things, in a way, it's really just comparing things. And this is, of course, not just a doodle or anything, it's not somebody's way of passing their time, this is a very famous picture by Salvatore Dali, called "The Persistence of Memory". And he is giving you some very weird images, the most obvious being these very limp, limp clocks. And there's a limp clock there, there's one over here, this one is saying a different time, they're at different times, they don't seem to be saying the right time at all. And they're in a very quiet really background and then you've got this very odd thing here, and then all these ants over this closed watch over here. So the surrealists take this a long way in terms of making unusual comparisons between things as we know how they are and things as they're presented in a visual sense because so often we say "Well, we know it because we can see it". So in a simpler term, you'd have something like an idea of scale which people use a lot in something like advertising where you're obviously, we have a butterfly which weighs absolutely nothing, contrasted with the rhino which weighs a ton or more, and somehow they're balanced on a seesaw. And this is all about, it's gentle on your nose and it's hard on your allergies, so they found a visual simile for "gentle on your nose and hard on your allergies". So this idea is really sort of combining your analytical thinking with ways to transfer that into drawing, and sometimes you don't even have to go to the drawing. Sometimes it's just setting it down, "Well, gee, hard and soft", and then, "a feather and metal", and then you go from there and maybe you come up with an idea for a painting or not."