It was supposed to be a lovely morning to sleep. Good Friday, no school, only my husband needed to head off to work and traffic is light on holidays so he could leave later. No one to roust out of bed before 6:00 a.m. (the bus comes at 7:00 and our kids need a long time to come fully awake). I was ignoring the canine alarm clock barking downstairs. The dogs could wait a bit. But what couldn’t wait was the design idea that kept building in my head. It started out simple, just a rough concept, but my mind wouldn’t let it go. By the time I could picture the complete necklace design, I knew sleep was pointless. I had to get up and sketch the design before if flew away into the artistic ether.
So I got up, made some tea, dealt with the dogs and sat down and sketched 6 pages of various design ideas. Wow! I haven’t had a flood of ideas like that in a long time. Sometimes I feel like some mental switch has turned on in my brain and I can’t stop the ideas. All I can do is take a moment to sketch them. When ideas are flowing like this, I generally start with a single design that’s been rolling around in my head, but the process of sketching often brings out other ideas. Frequently, the concepts I am sketching are based on things I’ve been thinking about for awhile, variations of concepts I may have sketched before. Taking a look back through old sketches, there are identifiable central themes, shapes and ideas.
Most of these ideas never make it out of my sketchbooks. They’re not all good ideas. Maybe they’re all junk, but at least it is a start. Drawing ideas for me is like taking a zillion photographs, hoping to get one great shot. Sketching can also be a form of problem solving. It may take my brain several tries before I come up with a reasonable solution to how to accomplish a given idea or “look”. Sitting down in the studio with a rough sketch and starting on that design, may ultimately lead me in an entirely different direction.
It’s fascinating to me how different artists approach the design process. Some artists are very rigorous about sketching out a specific design, recording each step as they plan the process. Other artists let the materials guide them. The inspiration and design happen in the moment. I think I probably fall somewhere in the middle, maybe a little closer to the planning side. This is not to say that I never just sit down and fiddle around with clay and let things happen. I do that a lot. But every one of the designs I really love, the ones that I am proud of, those designs all started as sketches. They all had a big element of planning.
Another odd component of my design process is that I do better when I am working on several concepts at once. Three seems to be the ideal number. This has happened to me several times, and now I know to just go with it. Deadlines sometimes help too. Working toward a deadline for a submission to a book or exhibit can give me the excuse I need to ignore everything else and surrender to the creative process. When I have been really pressed for time and decided to just concentrate on one idea, it’s been a disaster. My 3 project mode ends up something like this: one design fortunately comes out the way I imagined, and one idea is so-so. The third one is the killer. This is the idea that so completely captures my attention, the idea that has me staying up till the wee hours to complete. Then in the morning, when I see it with the bit of distance and perspective a night’s sleep provides, all I can think is “what the ****?”.
Of course the great irony of this big flood of new design ideas is that it came too late for the two exhibits I was hoping to enter. Still, I am incredibly grateful to feel these ideas flow since it has been such a long time since I had any ideas worth sketching.
So, what’s your design process? Are you a sketcher/planner? Or do you just go with the flow?
