Learn about Imagery
An Imagery Seed communicates primarily through a visual creation. Rather than requiring words to explain an idea, experience, emotion, character, place, or moment, the image itself becomes the creative work and the starting point for whatever it might inspire next.
Imagery Seeds can include photography, photo manipulation, illustrations, paintings, drawings, digital art, AI-assisted or AI-generated art, collage, mixed-media work, graphic design, conceptual art, cartography and creative maps, 3D renders, character art, scenes, abstract art, comics, and other forms of visual expression. The work can be created with traditional materials, cameras, digital tools, emerging technologies, or combinations of them.
An Imagery Seed might depict a specific scene or tell a visual story, but it does not have to. A photograph can capture a real moment, while photo manipulation can transform reality into something that never existed. A 3D artist might construct an entire environment, while a cartographer could create a real, fictional, historical, speculative, or artistic map. An abstract composition of color and shape can qualify just as easily as a detailed portrait or landscape.
The image should be the primary creative contribution, not merely decoration for something else. An illustration accompanying a Fiction Seed, for example, might instead become its own Imagery Seed when the creator wants the artwork itself to be experienced, discussed, and used as inspiration.
Imagery Seeds can be Original Seeds or inspired Child Seeds. A photographer might interpret the emotion of a poem, an artist could illustrate a moment from a story, a cartographer might map a fictional world, a 3D creator could build a place described in another Seed, or someone might transform an existing idea through photo manipulation or an entirely different visual style.
And no one else has to see what the original creator saw. A mysterious photograph might inspire one person to write a horror story and another to write a romance. A map could inspire an entire fictional civilization. The colors in a painting might inspire music. A 3D environment could become the setting for a film. Another visual creator might reinterpret the same subject through a completely different medium.
The purpose of an Imagery Seed is to communicate something visually and then leave room for other people to see something of their own in it.
