What do you do when you are totally stuck and really don’t know where to start on an art journaling page or a scrapbook page? Even if you are using a list of simple prompts, you may still need an extra nudge of inspiration! Here is an idea you may not have thought of – a way to look online for very random inspiration!

Layout inspired by music album cover art.

There are many places online to find images.  However, we are not looking for something to copy, we are looking for inspiration. A couple of key places to look are Ebay and Amazon! The reason those are great places to look is because there are going to be so many things associated with a word you type into your search. If you are only using one of the regular search engines like Google or Bing, your search will really be much more narrow. The images that come up will be so closely related to your search word, that they will all be very similar unless you scroll down to page 1,000 of the search!

When you use Ebay or Amazon, you should have such random things come up that you might get an inspirational idea such as:

• a color palette
• a layout
• a reminder of a technique you haven’t used in a while or maybe have never tried

Let’s talk a little more specifically. There are often books and packaging that come up in this type of search. Why not use them as inspiration? You may take the layout of the lettering, the graphic design, or the color scheme. That would be three ways to use the look of just one book or package. That’s just the beginning! There are so many ways this could take you

Some ways that you might generate random images could be using:

• your name
• the street you currently live on
• the street you grew up on
• a pet’s name

What you come up with may be very out of the ordinary for your usual work! Here is another post about using prompts.

Have you tried this method of random idea inspiration?  What did you come up with?