What method do you usually use to pick a theme? I usually do the old "character(s) I have wanted to draw for a while, so how can I shoehorn them into this?" trick, except for the Favorite Moments calendar which didn't need that. There's also the "what forgotten detail of the stories can I give attention to" approach. I don't know how other people find their ideas, though. I suspect it's a very personal process.
Yeah, good point.
For me, the problem is that when I'm confronted with a theme that has many possible answers, my mind actually blanks out and cannot narrow it down to think of ANYthing. (Or, not that it can't think of anything at all, but nothing that is coalescing into a workable subject; it's all still too broad to be grasped.) Or, one interpretation will occur to me and my brain will get stuck on it, and be unable to branch out (which is especially frustrating when the one thing I'm stuck on isn't furnishing ideas that I like). Those are cases where what I can really use are others' suggestions just because they will be other ways of looking at the "answer" and will help jolt me out of the rut my thinking is stuck in.
Last year, I was actually greatly helped because I think there was at least one thread at SoC where a big list was made either of types of magic, or of magic-users, which helped me to organize all of the thoughts that wouldn't settle down. I think I ended up picking something that wasn't on the lists, but having the lists helped me organize my thoughts to see other ideas that hadn't been included, if that makes sense.
Sometimes yeah, I *do* approach a task like this from the angle of "what character do I want to draw?" (Notably, for the last two calendars, I've kind of known that I wanted to include Bearclaw ;-) Though for last year, that wasn't my *primary* motivating goal, it just turned out to be a good fit with the subject I ended up picking.)
Sometimes it's "what group do I want to do?" (wolfriders? Go-Backs? for me, it's usually wolfriders) or "what time period do I want to tackle?" (especially if I'm trying to get away from what I think more popular choices will be).
At the moment, I guess, I'm mostly experiencing the problem that the topic is so broad that I'm having a hard time focusing down to the level where actual, viable ideas can be found.
I may not need people to *give* me possible subjects as much as I need to hear how others are approaching the problem. Anything to help me focus...
