I share a room with my fiancee, and then there are two other rooms are occupied by my fiancee’s sister, and a friend of mine, it’s a 500 square feet lil’ apartment, and that leave my room with no proper chair which is seriously hurting my shoulders and back, my laptop piled on top of books and just stuff laying around with not enough space to work comfortably. So my fiancee and I decided to rent another space to work as a studio so I could set up a desk, while she could recieve her clients for tarot card reading and henna drawing.
So the past couple of week was a lot of heavy lifting, going back and forth two places (30 minutes away) when I have to work my job, work my side project and band practice.
I thought I had it all planned out nicely…A mindmap of a mindmap! Thinking it was the perfect solution to deliver a line drawing (actually a whole bunch of line drawings) for this week’s task.
When it comes to drawing, I’d say I sketch more than I draw draw…I am not confident in my line work at all. With a mechanical pencil i’m OK, but with line drawing pens, I know I probably shouldn’t waste the time attempting it.
So once the mindmap was finished, I went to my trusty AI to do the line work, I didn’t think much in to how I would treat it after I’ve picked out all my lines, I thought I was in control.
It was around this point, already having spent like 3 hours on this and it struck me…I am clueless to how I should treat this and make it presentable afterwards. I think this is the first task since the course started that I went in head first without a complete chain of processes to finish, and I honestly haven’t felt this feeling of defeat in a very very long time. BUT believe it or not it honestly made me feel much more alive!
It proves that my methods are not bullet proof, something I thought I was so familiar with turned out failing me completely. At first I felt a lil’ down…but then just a couple minutes later I thought to myself “holy shit, I haven’t felt like this since earning my degree 8 years ago.”.
For the past decade, I am used to having colors to fall back on to and it will just layer and prioritise objects for me, and in this case working in black and white has left me with a flat pile of mess.
I will remember the teachings of this assignment dearly, and it’s a good smack in the face to always have a complete plan before I act and not to focus on the small things and leave out the big picture.
Results
This probably doesn’t work out for everyone, but having done this mindmap made me think about how creativity and design is generated (for me at least).
There are the “words” that get pointed and linked to the most:
FIND, MEMORIES, FIND, LOCATE, HUNCH, FEELING, SENSES, TIME, SUCCESS
TO FIND = Research, talking to people
MEMORIES = What I already know, the things that relate to me that I could recall
FIND, LOCATE = To identify or picture solutions
HUNCH = If this would work, being confident or not (which failed me this time, but I STILL BELIEVE IN YOU!)
FEELING, SENSES = The considerations of how the viewer would view the piece, to put myself into their shoes
TIME = Oh we all know how important this is!
SUCCESS = Be it money or compliments, everything is done to achieve personal satisfaction of some sort.
So I do think this weeks challenge is a success. Although late…I took s dive in to my head and I didn’t even expect to gain my results this way. Unlike a solid set of guide lines, they are open and pretty much sums up the process, the drive and psychology of a design creative process for me!
Let’s see what you think about it.
ANDY was here
ANDY was here 🤓 