Mermaids...

So it's not my regular thing, but the other night sleep just wouldn't come and so I lay awake staring at the ceiling and thinking up variations on mermaids and dogs and I can't even remember what all else. These are a couple of quick watercolor sketches; I'm planning on doing a character lineup - let's see how that works out.

Been thinking about ideas, and how they're often so closely guarded. Information is pretty free nowadays, if you ask someone what kind of pencil they use they'll tell you. The pencil isn't the trick; it's what's inside their head that's the trick. You could concievably come up with a mathematical formula for drawing like Mignola or Wendling, but that's still only the style, not the content.
What a lot of people miss is that ideas, like your technique and like your tools, are just extensions of your head. Ideas can come and go, but if you jealously hang on to one of your ideas specifically, nurse it and shelter it and keep it away from prying eyes - from my experience, it doesn't thrive and grow. It becomes bloated, stagnates, complicates itself unneccessarily because it hasn't got other ideas bouncing off of it and snapping off the unneccessary bits.

Here's the thing I'm trying to say: someone stealing an idea is just like someone stealing your pencil. There, now they have it; but just as they can't draw your drawings with the pencil they've got now, their thought that used to be your idea (and now I'm a little lost here because it sounds like I'm encouraging plagarism) - their thought is theirs, and if they toss it out and make it grow, that's great. If they sit there and try to follow where your idea was going - that'll turn out crappy because you're the only one who knew, and maybe not even consciously.

My point being: there are always more pencils, sketchbooks, and ideas than there are people to use them.

(oh yeah, and a picture)