Posts Tagged ‘handmade’

For the past few months, I’ve been plan­ning and plot­ting and get­ting myself excited about the prospect of another big trip. Those who know me are well aware of my fond­ness for travel, and I haven’t gone any­where inter­esting (Ottawa doesn’t count) for some time. I had big plans (South America, Death Valley, Mexico) that never mate­ri­al­ized, for one reason or another, and I was sure that this was the one I’d be able to do.

As it turns out, it’s not. Due to a variety of fac­tors, I’m staying home. While this was a little crushing at first to realize (I was so excited!), I am choosing instead to approach it as an oppor­tu­nity to enjoy the nice Hal­ifax weather that’s been hap­pening lately (must be a cosmic fluke and/or the uni­verse con­spiring to send me thou­sands of tiny little signs that I should abandon my plans of aban­don­ment) and to spend more time doing fun projects, which I almost invari­ably wouldn’t be doing if I were on the road.

For starters, I’m finally going to invest the time and floor­space into set­ting up a proper work­space for myself, rather than just lounging on the couch all the time–I do miss having cre­ative space (why oh why did I sell my drafting table at a yard sale for $15?) and things stuck all over my walls, and some­times the entire upstairs of my apart­ment looks like it’s been hit by a cyclone that car­ries nothing but paper scraps, bot­tles of ink, and empty cans of energy drinks.

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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!

This year has marked my first ven­ture into “selling stuff”, instead of just “selling myself”. It’s been a little hit-and-miss: my Valen­tines seemed pop­ular (they were listed on Ooh! Shiny! and in the Etsy blog, and I’ve heard loads of pos­i­tive feed­back), which was immensely exciting, but they didn’t sell like mad. (They didn’t really even sell like slightly-unusual.)

First lesson learned: just because you make some­thing that people like, doesn’t mean that people will actu­ally buy it.

This weekend, at a friend’s sug­ges­tion, I booked a booth at a local farmer’s market. For only $60, it seemed like a wildly clever busi­ness idea. How could I pos­sibly NOT make a fortune?

Well, not only did I not make a for­tune, but I actu­ally didn’t sell a single card, unless you count the one that I traded a book­seller for a tat­tered copy of The Slang of Sin. There were quite a few people who came by and told me how much they liked them, and one person even asked how much they cost (they were next to a sign that listed prices, but that seems irrelevant).

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So if you’ve been any­where within a ten-mile radius of me any­time in the last week and a half, you’re prob­ably well aware of The Big Card Project. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valen­tines, thinking it’d be a a fun little project that’d get me away from the com­puter, make me feel more cre­ative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumb­nail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketch­book because things invari­ably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basi­cally, I’m just trying to get the com­po­si­tion right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy worka­holic per­fec­tionist with an insom­niac streak a mile wide when­ever I get really pas­sionate about a project. My little lark of a project kept me up late, made an utter war­zone of my apart­ment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

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Jan­uary marks the three-year-anniversary of the day I told my employer to “take this job and shove it” (in all seri­ous­ness, HB Stu­dios was a fan­tastic place to work, but Office Space was what gave me my moment of epiphany required to take the leap). Three years seems like for­ever ago, and I’ve learned so much since then, but it’s always good to look back and figure out what I could be doing better.

So, where my major issue has always been burnout (both of the cre­ative sort and the plain old good lord, am I ever exhausted! variety), I’m looking to add more work-play bal­ance to my life. Over the past year, I’ve become better at adding play to my life, and, just in the end of December, I found myself unex­pect­edly doing things I’ve always meant to do while run­ning my busi­ness, but have somehow man­aged to evade quite con­sis­tently: eating and sleeping on a daily basis, working less than six­teen hours a day, and playing with cre­ative projects that take me away from The Machine.

My poor kitchen table. It is utterly COVERED in ink stains now.

What I’m excited about for the new year, not sur­pris­ingly, are also the things that I’m pas­sionate about in my life. (more…)