* Kon knows what he's talking about: "as for inspiration, you'll get that from any experience which moves you. all you have to do is search for them, they dont always have to be exterior things or physical things.."
* Any structural elements are likely to come jointly from my code and from photos I took -- maybe this shouldn't be counted since there is a degree of creativity required to write good code. Anyway, a digital camera is handy for isolating a salient aspect of a scene compared to actually being at the scene with your eye, I find that useful; and the structural elements based on my code are usually at least sound, and sometimes extremely sound.
* I use terminal windows a lot (Eterm), and I have it set to pick two words from the dictionary, hyphenate them, and use that as the terminal title. It also logs them for future reference. It's obviously not very good at keeping a theme between ideas, but it often provides interesting silly ones. like (indecency-utilized, cornices-syntax, expectation's-knaves, cheeseburgers-discovery, peps-veep, enumerate-obloquy, decedent's-monomania, addressee-skiing, geologic-doggy)
* For just creating pieces, I rarely get art-blocked; I don't go to start a drawing and think... '?' very much at all. For individual aspects of a piece (like 'how EXACTLY should that be shaded'), I do sometimes. I believe that art-block is just a sort of artistic doubtfulness, where your choices look too many or too few to choose, and I can usually resolve it by looking at a few places or photos and being decisive about how it will go. If I can't get a ref, I just make up a likely algorithym and execute it (haha, programmer-speak.), if I can't just scribble until it looks about right.
* For landscape, just chuck down some tiles, and more tiles, and more tiles (I can produce copious quantities of tiles with relative ease.), then I have some tiles and some elements to use in a drawing.
* The old technique of just throwing down some lines, and more lines, until it looks like something, then drawing what it looks like
* Weirding out my drawing process -- like drawing white on black rather than black on grey, incremental rather than one-shade-at-a-time,...
* Any kind of vigorous exercise is always good for clearing the mind, providing you breath properly. It usually helps me improve my perspective.