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…)