A couple of people wrote me on my Facebook from yesterday's post about trying to find inspiration. They asked me to write a little more about my process. Being that I'm still figuring it out for myself considering this is different than what I normally do, this post is kind of a break down of what happened in the last couple of days.
For starters, I read, a lot. Not like Twilight books (what, you're surprised?). For some reason reading long chapters of fiction has the magical effect of quieting my brain and putting me to sleep. Literally. It's like narcolepsy. But I consume insane amounts of magazine length articles, and occasionally longer academic type writing. Recently I've been reading with this voice in the back of my head trying see if there's an interesting way of building on what I read into a blog post.
Meh. Still stuck and now I feel like I'm just taking short cuts. After a couple of days of this I said screw it. Let's make stuff.
Aaaaand back to the make what issue. Well this is much easier since like I bitch about in class all the time, "Make things you care about". What kinda cool, sorta funny, partially unexpected things have I been into recently. Introspection time.
Last week I finally got to watch The Lego Movie and EVERYTHING WAS AWESOME. So much so that I've been singing their theme song in the car everywhere I go. All I need is a sign on the side of my car that says Free Candy and, well, you can picture it. One of the big scenes that absolutely had me dying was UniKitty finally going ham with rage. That reminded me of so many sweet little 7 year old girls that are 1 undercooked cupcake away from serial killing.
It's been a while since I painted anything other than bedroom walls that I figured let's leave the camera alone and make a mess. Now I've got a topic and a medium. But still no execution. I didn't want to overthink this one so I headed over to my workstation to mock up a cute design template for the painting. This might seem a bit strange but I like to map out my work in Adobe Illustrator to give me a game plan. I doodled a couple of quick sketches on paper then polished my favorite one in the software.
I primed the canvas and just need to run out for spray paint. Initially I was going to work with regular paint, which I might still do, but right now I'm thinking texture of spray would look nicer and go better with the cartoony nature of the piece.
Well, sure enough, half way through finishing the mockup I had this other cool idea hit me. I was listening to some old school EDM (all my students just rolled their eyes, I play this in class almost daily). I've had a lifelong love for Adidas, from soccer camp to 4" platformed Gazelles at Limelight. Yeah, I've embraced that I'm a dork a long time ago. My favorite thing to say to myself is "what would happen if......". So I did just that with Adidas as the topic and kept rolling from the UniKitty mockup directly into the next sketch/mockup that you can see in the tab within the image. That's it for now. I'll tell more about it when I'm done executing, hopefully tomorrow.
Seems like I just got a little momentum with inspiration.
For starters, I read, a lot. Not like Twilight books (what, you're surprised?). For some reason reading long chapters of fiction has the magical effect of quieting my brain and putting me to sleep. Literally. It's like narcolepsy. But I consume insane amounts of magazine length articles, and occasionally longer academic type writing. Recently I've been reading with this voice in the back of my head trying see if there's an interesting way of building on what I read into a blog post.
Meh. Still stuck and now I feel like I'm just taking short cuts. After a couple of days of this I said screw it. Let's make stuff.
Aaaaand back to the make what issue. Well this is much easier since like I bitch about in class all the time, "Make things you care about". What kinda cool, sorta funny, partially unexpected things have I been into recently. Introspection time.
Last week I finally got to watch The Lego Movie and EVERYTHING WAS AWESOME. So much so that I've been singing their theme song in the car everywhere I go. All I need is a sign on the side of my car that says Free Candy and, well, you can picture it. One of the big scenes that absolutely had me dying was UniKitty finally going ham with rage. That reminded me of so many sweet little 7 year old girls that are 1 undercooked cupcake away from serial killing.
It's been a while since I painted anything other than bedroom walls that I figured let's leave the camera alone and make a mess. Now I've got a topic and a medium. But still no execution. I didn't want to overthink this one so I headed over to my workstation to mock up a cute design template for the painting. This might seem a bit strange but I like to map out my work in Adobe Illustrator to give me a game plan. I doodled a couple of quick sketches on paper then polished my favorite one in the software.
I primed the canvas and just need to run out for spray paint. Initially I was going to work with regular paint, which I might still do, but right now I'm thinking texture of spray would look nicer and go better with the cartoony nature of the piece.
Well, sure enough, half way through finishing the mockup I had this other cool idea hit me. I was listening to some old school EDM (all my students just rolled their eyes, I play this in class almost daily). I've had a lifelong love for Adidas, from soccer camp to 4" platformed Gazelles at Limelight. Yeah, I've embraced that I'm a dork a long time ago. My favorite thing to say to myself is "what would happen if......". So I did just that with Adidas as the topic and kept rolling from the UniKitty mockup directly into the next sketch/mockup that you can see in the tab within the image. That's it for now. I'll tell more about it when I'm done executing, hopefully tomorrow.
Seems like I just got a little momentum with inspiration.