Advice I Have Not Taken: My Thoughts on Picking a Style

A few weeks ago as I was ruminating over my place in the world, I mentioned that my latest, biggest fear was that everything I’m doing is NOT GOOD ENOUGH (crazy talk, right?... right?) and I’m progressively trying to improve and DO MORE BETTER. 

One area that’s pretty clear to me where I could be doing better is in having a defined style. I think if you read basically any design blog or book, the #1 piece of advice from artists/business owners/everyone is to have a clear, distinct, unique voice and style.

 And as a habitually distracted creative-type… this poses a pretty big challenge for me. Challenge #1: I love experimenting. Experimenting and learning new things is basically all I’ve been doing lately. 

Challenge #2: When you are learning new techniques, or when you are researching, or when you are just following other designers on social media… it’s tough not to be influenced. In my mind it works this way, “oh look, I love this style and it is super popular right now, I should do something like that.”

 Neither of these are necessarily BAD in my mind, and let me be clear, I’m not talking about COPYING someone else’s style (because, let’s be honest, I don’t have the attention span or talent to even go there). 

But when you are reading day-in-and-day-out that you need a refined style… that you need to pick one thing to be good at... it makes you think a lot (and possibly worry some more about being not good enough). 

And to me, there’s at least one style that I think is clearly “me.” And if you have known me for any period of time… this will not surprise you in any way whatsoever. And those are the doodles.

I started this blog to share my cover-the-page-with-weird-shapes doodles, like the ones throughout this post. It’s probably the only kind of drawing that comes naturally to me and that isn’t really influenced by other things I see. 

I just get obsessed with a shape, develop that shape, and then go nuts with that shape. I have done this since I could hold a pen in my hand. I just love, hand-drawn, tiny, repetitive patterns. Like this:

 Now the challenge is: how do I embrace that? How do I develop that in to something? How do I take what else I’ve learned to do and incorporate those things?

The answer: I don’t know. And as I’ve said before… I’m trying to share and embrace the process and worry less about not being there yet. So stay tuned and we’ll find out what happens together. Needless to say, there will definitely still be experimenting.

Sharpie Pen Love

As previously mentioned, Kevin was nice enough to give me some new Sharpies for Christmas. One pack was of these colored Sharpie pens. Sharpie pens are like the chocolate-covered-pretzel-marshmallow-chocolate of pens. That's how much I love them. A lot.

They are great for doodling during staff meetings... :o) But they aren't as expensive as the Micron pens I usually use for drawing and have pretty similar results. Here's what I drew last night:

From the Sketchbook

Wedgies and Wings

I love blank notebooks. I buy a ton of them... for no apparent reason. Same goes for sketchbooks. I keep one on the coffee table, one in my craft box and one in my office desk (just in case of a long telecon ;o) just incase the mood to doodle strikes. Which is does pretty often.

All of my patterns start as a doodle. Basically, I just start playing with shapes until I find something I love and can repeat. So, here are some recent sketches, some of which you will probably recognize because they became patterns later (they grow up so fast don't they?)

More wedges.

Yup, those started as pleated skirts.

I'm meeeellllting.

Does this look like a face to you? Kinda creepy right?

Even more wedges, a weird cat face
and a font I will eventually make. Love it.

So that's the quick round up. Some old stuff, some new stuff, but the bottom line is that doodling is basically my favorite thing. You know what Bailey Beagle's favorite thing is? I'll give you a hint... it's not this:

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle

One of my to-do items is to take some of my old designs and turn them into digital patterns. We'll call this "creativity recycling." But, easier said than done.

Let's just say most of my black and white originals took hours or days or weeks to finish, while most of the patterns I've done recently have taken about an hour.

This is probably because most of the originals were drawn pre-grad school when I actually had hours/days/weeks just to draw (while watching chick flicks of course). I chose this design to try out first because it was easiest to replicate on a tablet.

Here's the result. I need to work on the seams (the lines between the repeatable tiles) to make them less visible. I took the colors from this photo of a succulent at the U.S. Botanic Garden. Aren't the colors so nice and cool? Definitely more Spring than Autumn... but whatever :oP

Hot Like the Weather

No shocker for anyone here in the D.C. area but it was ridiculously hot today. And that's saying something because I grew up in Florida where most summer days are pretty blazing. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time inside so I made some new patterns.

What do you think about the colors? I picked them with Adobe Kuler. Also, I drew the original flower shape with pen and paper before scanning. I think I'm learning that that's just easier for me than drawing straight onto the tablet.

Flowers have really been inspiring me lately so I've been doing a lot of flowers Snarky Beagle-style (since I honestly couldn't draw a flower that looked real to save my life). Have a great weekend everyone. Stay cool!

Illustration Friday: Stay Up All Night

So it's been a while since I did Illustration Friday. The theme this week is "stay," which made me think of staying home so I started drawing a house... but then it got a little lumpy (what can I say... drawing things that actually look like things is not really my forte' but this is all for practice so I'm laying it all out there, yeah, Internet, so there) so it turned into a tree house.

I always wanted a tree house. I used to draw plans for tree houses and try and convince my dad to build one. We had this great (somewhat dead, but great) dogwood tree in the backyard. It would have made an epic tree house tree but it was hollow soooo maybe not the most structurally sound tree.

Illustration Friday: Bicycle

Taking on a new weekly project: Illustration Friday. Since I don't have to blog for class anymore, this might motivate me to keep drawing every week. Yay!