The creative act isn’t magical. Thought it can appear like magic at times, the idea that we make something from nothing is fantastical at best. 

When a designer sets out to create they’re building on what they’ve seen before, what has inspired them, what feels broken, what works. 

In art classes my professor had the students copy the great artists of old. We spent hours meticiulously tracing ever pen stroke, making as close a replica as possible. 

As a child I sketched out and drew things on paper, copied things, and tried to understand how beautiful pictures had been created, how they worked. Around 13 I discovered Macromedia Flash 4 and realized I could use it to recreate some of my favorite art. To this day the line drawing tool on Flash is still my favorite. You could draw a line, then drag around on its length to manipulate it into the perfect curves. Illustrator’s pen tool if fantastic and precise, and I’ve used it for many years, but the Flash line tool was delightful and easy.

There’s this old game online, called Neopets, and me and my brothers absolutely loved to play it. We ranked pretty high in the game (top 50 as I recall) at one point and enjoyed the community and gaming aspects of it. I was in particular a fan of the art style for the creatures that you cared for. So much so that I still use the online gaming tag of one of my favorite pets (and it happens to be my license plate for my car). 

At one point something clicked and I put my love of the game, my desire to create art, and my newfound obsession with Macromedia Flash together. 

Over the next few months I started to recreate the neopet creatures inside Flash. I’d drag a jpg of a pet into the artboard, and use the vector tools to trace over every single line. I replicated the brush strokes, the gradients, everything. 

When I was done, after many hours on each individual piece of art, I’d call my brothers over to try and figure out which was the original and which was my recreation. When they couldn’t tell the difference I knew I was onto something. A spark clicked inside me, this would be the thing I’d do forever, if I could figure out a way to make any kind of money from it. That led to trying out my own types of creatures, my own types of weapons; branching away from the original into variations on what I’d seen. 

The money part was slow to start, including getting ripped off by my first client (always get a down payment my dear designers!). 

But in copying my favorite art I realized something, later reinforced by my art professor and Austin Kleon. The creative act isn’t a magical mystery. 

To make something beautiful, something original, first spend time studying and stealing from the great artists and inventors that have come before you. 

Once you understand what can be done, you’ll start to branch out into other ways of expressing what you’ve learned. The new stuff you create isn’t really new, but it’s a remix. And those remixes, as you improve and grow and iterate further and further, will one day feel like magic. 

That’s where it starts. Look around, take in inspiration, think on it, play with it, re-arrange, and then start to see something new appear. 

It’s the same with writing. I love to read fiction and non-fiction in all forms from other authors. 

With graphic or product design I spend time looking at other ideas, then remix the dozens of things I’ve seen into something new for the project I’m tackling. 

When I’ve taught classes on sketching as a practice, I focus on the simplicity of conveying ideas. Using arrows, words, boxes and circles you can do a lot (far more than words alone) to get whats in your head onto paper, and by extension share that with others. 

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud walks through the history of visual media, starting with hieroglyphs and pictorial stories. 

If you aren’t artistic, or come from a design background, just know that you can use the simplest tools at your disposure to share ideas. If you are unsure how to start just look to others that you find inspiration from and spend time copying them. See something beautiful? Take a picture of it, save it, and use that as the starting point of your new creation.