Finding fresh, high-impact things to draw is a constant challenge for creative teams in game development, marketing, and design. The pressure to innovate quickly can lead to creative blocks, slowing down entire production pipelines and hindering the development of compelling visual assets. When inspiration wanes, projects stall, and the search for the next great idea becomes a bottleneck.

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This comprehensive guide is built to break through those creative barriers. It's not just a simple list of things to draw; it's a structured resource packed with actionable prompts and professional use cases tailored for high-performing teams. We will explore everything from character and environment design to detailed prop creation and marketing visuals. Each section is designed to provide specific, industry-relevant ideas that you can implement immediately.

The goal is to transform how you approach ideation. Beyond AI suggestions, exploring effective methods for collecting design ideas can significantly broaden your creative horizons and fuel your projects. This list isn't just about what to draw, it's about how to draw smarter and faster, ensuring your team always has a deep well of inspiration to pull from.

1. Character Design & Concept Art

Character design is the process of creating a unique visual identity for a character intended for media like games, animations, or films. It goes beyond a simple portrait, encompassing everything from anatomy and clothing to expressions that convey personality. This foundational practice is essential for any project aiming to build immersive worlds and tell compelling stories, making it one of the most rewarding things to draw for creative teams.

This discipline is crucial for establishing an emotional connection between the audience and the narrative. Think of iconic video game protagonists from series like Uncharted or the memorable cast of any Pixar film; their designs are instantly recognisable and communicate volumes about their roles in the story.

Actionable Tips for Character Design

To streamline your team's workflow in VirtuallPRO, consider these practical steps:

• Build a Foundation: Start by creating comprehensive mood boards and reference collections in a shared Virtuall workspace. Aggregate images for anatomy, fashion, colour palettes, and cultural influences to establish a strong visual direction.
• Explore Variations: Use AI generation to quickly produce multiple design variations. This allows your team to explore a wider creative space efficiently, testing different silhouettes, costumes, and hairstyles without extensive manual effort.
• Iterate with Feedback: Implement a robust version control system for character iterations. This ensures that all feedback from art directors and project managers is tracked, allowing for clear communication and organised revisions. For a deeper dive into this process, you can find more information about effective game character design here.
• Standardise and Specify: Create detailed character sheets and annotate them with precise design specifications, such as material callouts and colour codes. Establishing these guidelines within your shared workspace ensures consistency across all assets produced by the team.

2. Environment & Level Design

Environment and level design involves conceptualising and visualising the worlds where stories unfold, from vast outdoor landscapes to intricate interior architecture. This discipline is about more than just aesthetics; it includes lighting, atmosphere, and environmental storytelling to build a cohesive and believable space. For creative teams, drawing environments is fundamental to creating immersive games and interactive experiences.

This practice is critical for guiding players and setting the emotional tone of a project. Think of the sprawling, history-rich world of Skyrim or the detailed level layouts in a tactical RPG; the environment itself becomes a character that shapes the user experience. Well-designed spaces make navigation intuitive and enhance the narrative, making them powerful things to draw for any visual project.

Actionable Tips for Environment & Level Design

To effectively manage environmental asset creation in VirtuallPRO, your team can follow these steps:

• Parallel Style Exploration: Generate multiple biome and architectural styles in parallel using AI. This allows your team to quickly compare different artistic directions, from a sci-fi metropolis to a fantasy forest, and make informed decisions without a massive upfront time investment.
• Integrate 2D and 3D: Use AI image generation for initial concepts and mood pieces, then leverage 3D generation to quickly understand spatial relationships and layouts. This hybrid approach within VirtuallPRO helps bridge the gap between artistic vision and functional level design.
• Establish Centralised Guidelines: Maintain a shared workspace with detailed environmental design guidelines. Document key elements like colour palettes, material textures, and architectural rules to ensure consistency across all levels and zones created by the team.
• Annotate for Gameplay: Directly annotate environment concepts with notes on gameplay zones, points of interest, and player pathways. This ensures that art and design teams are perfectly aligned, translating visual concepts into interactive and engaging spaces.

3. Product Visualization & Marketing Renders

Product visualisation involves creating photorealistic or stylised renderings of products for marketing, e-commerce, and promotional content. This process is essential for brands launching products digitally, allowing them to showcase items in perfect lighting and ideal settings without physical photography. From packaging mock-ups to lifestyle shots, this is one of the most commercially valuable things to draw.

This discipline is crucial for bridging the gap between a concept and a tangible product in the consumer's mind. Think of the flawless imagery used for new tech gadgets or the aspirational furniture settings in an online catalogue; these visuals are engineered to drive sales and build brand desire long before a customer holds the item in their hands.

Actionable Tips for Product Visualization

To elevate your team's product rendering workflow in VirtuallPRO, implement these practical steps:

• Generate Product Variations: Use AI generation to instantly create product mock-ups in different colours, materials, and finishes. This allows marketing teams to test visual strategies or populate entire e-commerce catalogues with minimal manual effort.
• Create Reusable Templates: Develop and save standardised lighting rigs and environment templates within a shared Virtuall workspace. This ensures brand consistency across entire product lines and dramatically speeds up the rendering process for new items.
• Organise Asset Libraries: Systematically organise all product models, textures, and final renders by category and campaign. A well-structured library ensures that assets are easily discoverable and reusable for future marketing initiatives. For more details on this workflow, you can explore the benefits of 3D product rendering here.
• Maintain Brand Consistency: Utilise shared style guides within your workspace to lock in specific brand colours, logo placements, and photographic styles. This guarantees that every render, whether for social media or a product page, aligns perfectly with your brand identity.

4. Prop & Asset Design

Prop and asset design is the creation of detailed objects that populate a digital environment, from weapons and tools to furniture and foliage. These elements are fundamental to building believable and interactive worlds in games, films, and simulations. Good prop design not only enhances visual storytelling but also directly supports gameplay mechanics, making it one of the most practical things to draw for world-building.

This discipline is crucial for establishing a world’s technological level, cultural identity, and overall mood. Consider the iconic weapons from League of Legends or the environmental props in Fortnite; each asset is carefully designed to be instantly recognisable and to enrich the player's experience by making the world feel tangible and lived-in.

Actionable Tips for Prop & Asset Design

To organise your team's prop creation workflow in VirtuallPRO, follow these steps:

• Establish a Visual Library: Create a centralised workspace in VirtuallPRO to build prop design guidelines and reference libraries. Gather images, material references, and concept art to define a consistent visual style for all assets.
• Generate in Thematic Batches: Use AI generation to produce props in cohesive sets, such as a collection of sci-fi medical equipment or medieval furniture. This ensures stylistic consistency and speeds up the process of populating entire scenes.
• Create Game-Ready Models: Leverage 3D generation capabilities to transform 2D concepts into game-ready prop models. This streamlines the pipeline from initial idea to in-engine asset, reducing manual modelling time for your artists.
• Annotate with Technical Specs: Attach detailed annotations to each asset, specifying material callouts, texture requirements, and usage guidelines. This ensures that every team member, from artist to developer, understands how the prop should be implemented.

5. Creature & Monster Design

Creature and monster design is the art of conceptualising non-human entities for media such as games, films, and animation. This discipline involves inventing unique biologies, visual traits, and behaviours that feel both original and believable within their fictional worlds. It's a fundamental skill for teams working on fantasy, sci-fi, or horror projects, making it a challenging yet highly rewarding category of things to draw.

This creative practice is crucial for building memorable antagonists and enriching world-building. Consider the terrifying xenomorphs from Alien or the awe-inspiring beasts in the Monster Hunter series; their designs are iconic because they effectively communicate threat, function, and a sense of place. A well-designed creature can define an entire franchise.

Actionable Tips for Creature & Monster Design

To manage the complexity of creature creation in VirtuallPRO, your team can follow these structured steps:

• Build a Reference Library: Compile extensive mood boards in a shared Virtuall workspace with real-world animal anatomy, fossils, and deep-sea life. This biological foundation helps ground your fantastical designs in a sense of realism.
• Generate Evolutionary Variations: Use AI generation to quickly explore different evolutionary paths for a single creature concept. Experiment with variations in limbs, textures, and skeletal structures to find the most compelling design without investing hours in manual sketching.
• Establish a Design Taxonomy: Organise your creatures into a clear taxonomy within your project workspace. Categorise them by habitat, threat level, or species to maintain consistency and a clear overview of the world's ecosystem.
• Annotate with Behavioural Notes: Attach detailed annotations to creature models and concept art, specifying their behaviours, attack patterns, and potential gameplay mechanics. This ensures that the design intent is communicated clearly from the art team to animators and developers.

6. UI/UX & Interface Design

UI/UX and interface design involves creating the visual and interactive elements that users engage with in digital products like games, apps, and software. This discipline is not just about aesthetics; it’s about crafting intuitive, accessible, and functional experiences. From heads-up displays (HUDs) in video games to the menus of a mobile app, this practice is a fundamental part of what makes a digital product successful and is one of the most technical things to draw.

This design practice is crucial for user retention and satisfaction. Consider the minimalist, functional UI of FromSoftware’s games like Elden Ring or the clean, user-friendly interfaces of popular mobile apps; their design directly contributes to a seamless user experience, guiding interaction without causing distraction.

Actionable Tips for UI/UX & Interface Design

To enhance your team’s UI/UX workflow within VirtuallPRO, consider these organised steps:

• Create UI Design Systems: Establish a comprehensive UI design system within a shared Virtuall workspace. Centralise all components, style guides, and design tokens to ensure consistency across the entire product.
• Generate and Test Variations: Use AI generation to quickly produce multiple design variations for icons, buttons, and layouts. This facilitates rapid A/B testing and helps the team identify the most effective designs for user engagement. For teams focused on designing digital experiences, exploring specialised AI tools can significantly enhance the visual design and user interface development process. Discover the leading AI UI UX tools to build products faster.
• Maintain Component Libraries: Build and maintain a shared library of reusable UI components. This practice speeds up the design process and ensures that all team members are using the most up-to-date, approved assets.
• Annotate for Development: Annotate UI mock-ups with clear specifications for interactions, states (hover, pressed, disabled), and animations. Storing these annotated files in your workspace provides developers with the precise information they need for implementation.

7. Texture & Material Studies

Texture and material studies involve creating detailed surface definitions for 3D models and environments. This discipline moves beyond simple colour application, focusing instead on defining properties like roughness, metallic qualities, and translucency to achieve visual realism. For creative teams, drawing and designing these textures is essential for building believable worlds in games, films, and architectural visualisations.

This practice is crucial for achieving photorealism and conveying an asset's history and function. Think of the worn leather on a hero's armour or the grimy, rain-streaked concrete of a futuristic cityscape. These material details, often created in tools like Substance Designer or found in Unreal Engine's material libraries, are what make digital assets feel tangible and authentic.

Actionable Tips for Texture & Material Studies

To enhance your team's material creation workflow in VirtuallPRO, consider these practical steps:

• Generate Texture Variants: Use AI generation to quickly explore variations of a single material, such as different levels of decay, rust patterns, or wood grains. This accelerates the look development phase and provides more options for art direction.
• Create Reusable Libraries: Build and organise shared material libraries directly within your Virtuall workspace. Storing procedural textures and pre-configured material shaders allows your team to maintain consistency and efficiency across multiple projects.
• Explore Weathering and Ageing: Leverage AI prompts to generate unique weathering effects like scratches, dust accumulation, and water stains. This adds a layer of narrative depth to assets without requiring extensive manual painting for every detail.
• Annotate with Technical Specs: Attach technical specifications to your texture maps, detailing information like texture resolution, intended shader model, and channel-packing instructions. This ensures 3D artists can implement them correctly in the game engine or rendering software.

8. Storyboard & Narrative Visualisation

Storyboard and narrative visualisation is the art of translating a script or concept into a sequence of images. This process is fundamental for planning and communicating the flow of a story, mapping out camera angles, character actions, and emotional beats before production begins. For creative teams, it is an indispensable tool for projects in film, animation, and game cinematics, providing a clear visual blueprint for the final product.

This discipline is crucial for aligning the entire production team on a single narrative vision. Think of the complex action sequences in a major blockbuster film or the emotive cutscenes from a Blizzard cinematic; each frame is meticulously planned to guide the audience’s experience. Visualising the narrative early helps identify potential pacing issues and clarifies directorial intent, making it one of the most practical things to draw for storytelling.

Actionable Tips for Storyboarding

To effectively map out your narrative in VirtuallPRO, consider these organised steps:

• Establish Tonal Consistency: Create a central mood board in your Virtuall workspace to define the project's visual tone. Compile references for lighting, colour palettes, and cinematic styles to ensure every scene aligns with the director's vision.
• Generate Keyframes Rapidly: Use AI generation to quickly produce key storyboard panels for each major narrative beat. This allows your team to visualise the entire sequence efficiently, testing different compositions and camera angles without needing to draw every frame from scratch.
• Organise Scenes and Flow: Arrange your storyboard panels into scenes and sequences within a shared Virtuall project. This creates a visual timeline that can be easily rearranged and refined as the narrative evolves, keeping the entire team updated on the latest version.
• Annotate with Director's Notes: Add annotations directly onto each panel to specify camera movements, dialogue cues, sound effects, and character expressions. This layer of detail transforms a simple storyboard into a comprehensive guide for animators, editors, and VFX artists.

9. Concept Art & Visual Development

Concept art is the exploratory process of creating artwork to visualise the creative direction, aesthetic choices, and overall visual language for a project. It serves as the foundational blueprint for games, films, and interactive experiences, guiding all downstream production by establishing a clear visual identity before full-scale development begins. This makes it one of the most impactful things to draw for any creative team.

This discipline is essential for aligning the entire team on a unified vision. Think of the distinct, gothic world-building in FromSoftware’s games or the stylised production design of an animated film; these cohesive aesthetics are born from extensive concept art and visual development. It translates abstract ideas into tangible designs that inform modellers, animators, and level designers.

Actionable Tips for Concept Art & Visual Development

To enhance your team's visual development pipeline in VirtuallPRO, follow these organised steps:

• Build Comprehensive Reference Boards: Create a central repository in a Virtuall workspace for all visual inspiration. Aggregate mood boards, reference images, and stylistic influences to define the project's core aesthetic before your team starts drawing.
• Generate Concepts in Parallel: Utilise AI generation to rapidly explore multiple art directions simultaneously. This allows your team to produce a wide range of environmental concepts, character styles, and colour palettes, empowering art directors to make informed decisions faster.
• Create Style Guides from Concepts: Once a direction is approved, distil the key visual elements from the successful concepts into a formal style guide. Document colour codes, material properties, and design principles within your workspace to ensure consistency across all production assets.
• Organise and Document Iterations: Use VirtuallPRO to manage and track every concept art iteration. Documenting the design decisions and rationale behind each change creates a clear, historical record that keeps all stakeholders aligned and simplifies the feedback loop. For more foundational inspiration, you can explore some easy drawing ideas here.

10. Animation & Pose Reference Studies

Animation and pose reference studies involve creating visual guides for character movement, mechanics, and key actions. This practice goes far beyond static drawings, focusing on capturing the dynamics of motion, from explosive action sequences to subtle idle animations. These studies are a critical blueprint for animators, ensuring that every movement is believable, consistent, and full of character.

This discipline is essential for bringing characters to life in games and films. Think of the fluid combat combos in action games like God of War or the expressive gestures of characters in animated features; these are built upon a foundation of meticulously planned pose studies. Drawing these references helps define the rhythm, weight, and personality of a character's movement before committing to the complex animation process.

Actionable Tips for Animation & Pose Studies

To integrate pose studies into your team's animation pipeline using VirtuallPRO, consider these steps:

• Establish Pose Libraries: Create a centralised library in a shared Virtuall workspace to store all pose and motion references. Organise them by character, action type (e.g., walk cycle, attack, idle), and emotional state for easy access by the animation team.
• Generate Dynamic Variations: Use AI generation to explore a wide range of action poses and movement variations quickly. This is invaluable for brainstorming complex sequences like attack combos or athletic manoeuvres, providing animators with a rich set of options.
• Visualise Action Sequences: Sketch out keyframe storyboards or "pose-to-pose" breakdowns for critical animation sequences. Annotate these drawings with notes on timing, spacing, and arcs to guide the animation process and ensure the director's vision is met.
• Create an Animation Style Guide: Use your pose studies to build a definitive style guide for character movement. This document should outline core principles of motion, key silhouettes, and expressive poses, ensuring consistency across the entire animation team and project.

11. Lighting & Atmosphere Studies

Lighting and atmosphere studies involve exploring how light, colour, and environmental effects can establish a specific mood and guide the viewer's focus. This discipline is not just about illumination; it’s about crafting emotional impact and enhancing narrative depth through visual cues. From the eerie glow of a sci-fi corridor to the warm, inviting light of a fantasy tavern, these studies are fundamental for creating believable and immersive worlds.

This practice is essential for setting the tone in games and cinematic productions. Think of the stark, high-contrast lighting in a film noir setting or the soft, diffused light of a Ghibli film; each choice deliberately shapes the audience's emotional response and understanding of the scene. Mastering these elements is one of the most powerful things to draw to elevate environmental storytelling.

Actionable Tips for Lighting & Atmosphere Studies

To effectively integrate lighting and atmosphere studies into your team's pipeline using VirtuallPRO, consider these steps:

• Generate Diverse Scenarios: Use AI to quickly generate multiple lighting variations for a single environment. Explore different times of day, weather conditions, and colour palettes to find the perfect mood without spending hours on manual rendering.
• Create Lighting Guidebooks: Establish a centralised lighting guidebook in your Virtuall workspace. Document key principles, colour grading settings, and technical parameters to ensure visual consistency across different scenes and assets.
• Annotate for Clarity: Annotate your lighting studies with detailed technical specifications. Add notes on light source intensity, colour temperature, and fog density directly onto the images to provide clear, actionable guidance for 3D artists and level designers.
• Organise a Lighting Library: Build and maintain a shared library of pre-approved lighting setups and atmospheric effects. Organise these assets by environment type (e.g., "dungeon," "cyberpunk city," "forest") to accelerate the look development process for future projects.

12. Marketing & Social Media Content Creation

Marketing and social media content creation involves drawing and designing visuals specifically to promote a product, game, or brand. This field turns artistic skill into a powerful communication tool, crafting everything from stunning promotional key art to engaging social media graphics. The goal is to capture attention, convey a message, and build a connection with an audience, making it a critical area for commercial creative teams.

This discipline is essential for driving visibility and engagement in a crowded digital landscape. Think of the compelling launch artwork for a major game release or the viral character illustrations that dominate social media feeds; these visuals are strategically designed to attract, inform, and persuade potential customers. It's a fantastic category of things to draw that directly impacts a project's success.

Actionable Tips for Marketing Content Creation

To enhance your team's marketing art workflow in VirtuallPRO, implement these organised practices:

• Centralise Brand Guidelines: Create a dedicated workspace in VirtuallPRO to store and share all brand assets, including logos, colour palettes, and font specifications. This ensures every piece of promotional content remains consistent and on-brand.
• Generate Campaign Variations: Use AI generation to quickly produce diverse artwork variations for different platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. This allows you to tailor visuals to specific audience segments and A/B test campaign effectiveness without significant manual effort.
• Organise Promotional Assets: Structure your marketing content libraries by campaign, theme, and launch date. This systematic organisation simplifies asset retrieval and ensures marketing teams can quickly access the right visuals for timely promotions.
• Streamline Collaboration: Use shared workspaces to collaborate directly with marketing teams on content direction and feedback. This integrated approach ensures that artistic creation is perfectly aligned with strategic marketing objectives from the start.

12-Point Drawing Topics Comparison

Integrate Inspiration into Your Production Pipeline

This extensive exploration of things to draw has moved beyond simple prompts, reframing them as strategic starting points for professional production pipelines. We've journeyed through twelve core pillars of creative development, from the initial spark of Character and Creature Design to the final polish of Marketing Renders and UI/UX Elements. The key takeaway is clear: inspiration is not a passive event but an active, manageable resource. A fleeting idea for a unique prop, a compelling environment, or a dynamic character pose becomes immensely more valuable when it can be instantly captured, iterated upon, and integrated into a collaborative workflow.

The true challenge for modern creative teams is not a lack of ideas, but the friction involved in transforming those ideas into production-ready assets. The prompts and frameworks provided in this article, covering everything from Texture Studies to Narrative Storyboarding, are designed to bridge that gap. By treating these drawing ideas as structured briefs, you build a repeatable process for innovation.

From Sketch to Scalable Asset

The most successful creative enterprises are those that build systems to harness creativity at scale. The categories we've covered represent distinct yet interconnected stages of a typical production lifecycle. A lighting study can inform the mood of a level design, a single prop can define a character's personality, and a storyboard frame can dictate the requirements for dozens of downstream assets.

Key Insight: Every drawing prompt is a potential production task. By organising your creative explorations thematically, you are simultaneously building a library of pre-visualisation assets that can accelerate future projects and ensure creative consistency across your entire portfolio.

Think of each drawing session not just as practice, but as an investment in your project's visual library. The hundreds of things to draw listed here are not just for filling a blank page; they are for building worlds, defining products, and engaging audiences in a systematic and efficient manner.

Actionable Next Steps for Your Creative Workflow

To truly operationalise this wealth of inspiration, your team needs a central hub where ideas can be developed, managed, and deployed. The disjointed process of sketching on one device, sharing feedback on another, and tracking progress in a spreadsheet is a relic of the past. A unified platform is essential for maintaining momentum and ensuring compliance.

Here is how you can put these concepts into practice immediately:

1. Establish Thematic Prompt Banks: Organise your own internal list of things to draw based on the categories in this article. Create dedicated project spaces or channels within your workflow tools for Environment Concepts, Character Iterations, and UI Mock-ups.
2. Standardise Your Briefing Process: Use the AI prompt templates provided as a foundation for your own internal creative briefs. This ensures every team member, whether an artist or a project manager, starts with the same clear, actionable information.
3. Implement a Version Control System for Concepts: Don't let good ideas get lost in chat threads or local files. Use a system where every iteration is tracked, annotated, and accessible, turning a simple drawing prompt into a fully documented asset history.

By embracing this structured approach, you elevate drawing from a solitary activity into a powerful, collaborative engine for production. You create a seamless pipeline where a concept artist's sketch, an AI-generated variation, and a 3D modeller's final asset are all connected, traceable, and aligned with project goals. This is the future of creative production: integrated, intelligent, and infinitely scalable.

Ready to transform your team's creative sparks into a streamlined production powerhouse? Virtuall provides a secure, enterprise-grade Creative AI OS designed to manage your entire visual content pipeline, from initial prompt to final asset. Explore how our platform can help you organise your ideas, collaborate effectively, and turn countless things to draw into tangible results by visiting us at Virtuall.