Learning from (loving your) mistakes

In the interest of con­tinuing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated pro­jects, I’ve been taking a screen­printing class at the fant­astic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fant­astic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been extensive and it may have been more dif­fi­cult to find the motiv­a­tion to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my oppor­tunity. With pro­jects and to-do lists con­stantly piling up, I may oth­er­wise have aban­doned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, how­ever, meant that I needed to accept imper­fec­tions. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit per­snickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “fin­esse” the whole thing, and I typ­ic­ally com­plain that Pho­toshop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valu­able tend­ency in a designer (and, in fact, I sus­pect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hindrance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Fin­ished thank you cards, each one screen­printed by hand! I’m not happy with the heart design at all–the lines are sim­ul­tan­eously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven pro­jects are fin­ished late: while client pro­jects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often con­tent to let my expected dead­line pass me by in favour of pro­du­cing work that’s closer to “per­fect” (it’s never actu­ally per­fect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new web­site, and why my Valentines were barely even printed and ready to go by the four­teenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dan­gerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screen­printing class, I had no option (other than flak­i­ness, which I’m giving up as a life­style choice as much as pos­sible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t per­fect, telling myself that it was just a learning pro­ject, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing pro­cess is this: everything that looks like a fatal error to me is basic­ally invis­ible to everyone else.  (Not a major rev­el­a­tion, but some­thing I ought to con­stantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fun­da­mental flaws in the ini­tial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I pro­ceeded with the printing pro­cess, I real­ized that I hadn’t been as pre­cise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screen­printing, each colour is printed inde­pend­ently of the others, much like a tra­di­tional CMYK plate-printing pro­cess that I learned about in school, but never actu­ally had a chance to wit­ness.) Accord­ingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the regis­tra­tion often didn’t line up per­fectly, and there was an overlap.

Then some­thing funny happened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to register and measure the place­ment of every single print to ensure a per­fect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw cau­tion utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tan­trums, I care­fully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actu­ally dis­covered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Who­ever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the hand­made pro­cess anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mis­takes. (Are you listening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mis­takes are often the most inter­esting part of a piece of work, and they so often gen­erate new ideas and con­cepts that might oth­er­wise forever remain undis­covered (gravity, nylon, peni­cillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And espe­cially when some­thing is hand­made, part of its appeal lies in its imper­fec­tions: signs of the inher­ently flawed human touch. So often the aes­thetics of error (cracks in pave­ment, burned-out build­ings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more inter­esting, alive, and vibrant than the ster­ility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to everything else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

Tags: handmade, misc, process, zen