Ideas to try

[AcouSvnt]

Starting a thread for general ideas to try, things that might loosen some creative blocks ...

How about importing photos (rather than drawings) as images to trace -- kind of like rotoscoping except that you're not tracing a whole movie, just a still picture -- then use the magnet tool to distort your traced image and make it more "cartoonish".

How about entering song lyrics[1] one, two, or three words at at a time into images.google.com to find arbitrary "inspirational images" as starting points. Look at the first page of results, quickly decide what grabbed your eye the most, draw your own personal impression of it, and somehow work that into your project. The less relevant (or more ironic), the better.

[1]I say song lyrics because in my case I want to largely base animations on music ... find some variation on this idea that's more suited to what you're working on.

[cribble]

Oh oh, heres a great one to do.

Draw your shape, character... whatever and fill it and put the line pixel down to 1... now when you fill it, say orange, find a line colour that will boost it like brown or a deeper shade of orange. So the the theory is, fill, darker shade of fill outline.

And mess around with sun sets and sun rise. Use the gradient tools to achieve a realistic sky effect and use alpha/opacity to interchange between day to night... you can get some real nice effects.

[Hiddicop]

I got a nice idea, but there probably are a lot of moho-users that have thought about it before me. Having made a object (Preferebly a seperet vector- or grouplayer) on a polished surface or a reflective surface you can dublicate the layer and flip it verticaly. By changing its alpha you can make it look like a reflection. It's really nice actually.