I’m learning to improvise. I come from a primarily studio art background so improvisation in studio art came fairly natural. Oh you messed up painting that human, well now its a tree so everything is just fine. Translating this improvisation to design is not always easy to me. Sometimes I’m worried about getting messy, thinking that whatever I create needs to be this finely polished, aesthetically pleasing masterpiece to be praised. I usually end up getting stuck at this point because I don’t want to mess up. It used to happen sometimes too before starting a painting or drawing, the intimidation of all that pure white space. So usually I would wash my canvas with diluted brown umber, or put a light layer of charcoal on my drawing pad. It helped me not worry about making mistakes, working in layers up to the final piece.
I am loving that our studio class is in an essence doing the same thing with design principles. Starting with just this little nugget of information and scratching away at different layers has helped me not worry as much about being messy or imperfect. I find myself wanting to keep my mistakes and work over them. I want to see the transition and the change instead of pretending like it never happened. I’m excited to see where the rest of this studio semester will lead my ideas.