Spider Diagrams: Exercise 4, OCA Illustration Course

This exercise involved making spider diagrams for a number of given words. The idea is to get you generating lots of ideas around one key word: to consider connections with a word or an idea, your own interpretation of what that idea means, colours, textures, places, feelings. Then to ask another person what words they come up with and see how many joint words you agree on and whether they come up with new ideas.  The idea behind this kind of brain-storming is that the more ideas you have for a particular commission, the more likely you are, through testing those ideas, to come up with the idea that best meets the needs of the commission.

Here are my spider diagrams for the words "Seaside" (fig. 1), "Childhood" (fig. 2), "Angry" (fig. 3) and "Festival" (fig. 4).  The words that came to my mind are in black, then I asked my husband to brain-storm the same words - his words are in red. Where we came up with the same words, I've underlined them in red.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

What I learnt:

Some words I found easier than others to brainstorm, but once I got started and just wrote down whatever popped into my head, the words really started to flow. One word would lead to another and another, then something on a completely different tangent would pop into my head and that would then lead to other words.

The words would usually come first from my own experience of things associated with that word, especially with the "Childhood" brainstorm - we've all had a childhood and that's the only childhood we know of, so that's naturally the one we'll think about.

When I had exhausted words related to my own experience I would think about other interpretations. This was particularly the case with the word "Festival" which can have so many meanings. At first I thought about music festivals like Glastonbury, then I thought about traditional festivals, for example in Indian culture. Then it occurred to me that Christianity also has it's own "festivals".

I was surprised by the number of words I came up with and how quickly the page filled up with words.  The word I found hardest to brain-storm was "angry", perhaps because it is an emotion, rather than a visual place or memory or event, like the other words. I'm sure that would make "angry" much more difficult to draw too.

It was really interesting to see what words my husband came up with - on the whole, completely different to the words that popped into my head. It goes to show it's worth asking other people's opinions when generating ideas since we all have different experiences which can result in different ideas.