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Down the Rabbit Hole: Trusting the Creative Process

About a week and a half ago, I started work on a new design project.  It’s a great project for an organization in the education sector, and I’m excited about it.  Yet when I started it, I headed in the same direction I seem to head at the beginning of every new project–that is, down the rabbit hole of self-doubt.  About three hours into the whole creative process, I had convinced myself that all my ideas were crap, and I was going to have nothing to show the client in two days when the preliminary design was due.

Of course, this turned out to be utter garbage, and after giving my brain some space by driving several hours, playing in the pit orchestra for a show, and sleeping on it, I realized that in fact, what I had come up with was pretty great.  The good thing is that I know my brain likes to play this game with me.  In fact, it does it almost every time I try to create something.  And I know that if I just give it time, that part of my brain that tells me whatever I do isn’t good enough will finally turn off and let me get some real work done.  But at hour three, it’s pretty frustrating.

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Renovation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wallpaper Scraper

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One reason I haven’t been making all that much stuff lately is because, shortly after the new year, I embarked on another project.  I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “My God, what is wrong with this woman?  How many projects does she need to have going at one time?”  The answer probably falls somewhere between 5 and 10.  Seriously.  Otherwise I feel like I’m being lazy.  No doubt it’s a character flaw.

So here’s what I’m doing.  I’m renovating my back bedroom.  It’s the last bedroom that needs to be redone, and I will be psyched to have all the rooms–save for the bathroom–finished on the second floor.  My house is old, so the typical things that need to be done in each room are taping and spackling, painting, refinishing floors, and running electrical to add outlets.  But before all of this can happen, there’s the wallpaper scraping.  And after the wallpaper scraping, there’s more wallpaper scraping.  And just when you think you’re done, you remember that the ceilings have wallpaper on them, too.  And then you wonder, “Why the fuck would anyone WALLPAPER THE CEILING?”  (I’m told that this was common practice earlier in the 20th century, but really, unless you’re suffering from a severe case of poor judgment or recently had a lobotomy, why on earth would you choose to wallpaper the ceiling?)

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The Burden of Making Stuff

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Now that I’ve embarked on this new plan to make more stuff, I find myself at a crossroads that I’ve come to before.  As someone who’s not terribly into accumulating stuff (even cool, handmade stuff), I find myself asking the question, “Why am I making this?”  Last week, I got sucked into the vicious cycle of surfing around Etsy and alternating between feeling tremendously inspired by the things I find on there and feeling excruciatingly awful about myself because it seems as though everything I come up with has already been done.  The latter feeling is a slight variation on how I used to feel when I was painting growing up–as though every good concept for a painting had already been painted, so why even bother?

Of course, this kind of thinking is totally useless, especially if you’d prefer to spend your days doing something productive, instead of just balling yourself up in a corner and feeling like you’ve never had an original thought in your life.  But I think it does point to a larger question:  What’s my motivation for making stuff?

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