Making Friday: Fending off the snooze

Frequently, when I go to my work studio in Salt River, my primary impulse is to put my feet up and take a serious nap. I think it must be the contrast of the busy production studio with the quiet, completely private studio space across town which triggers the nap impulse, and it’s horribly tempting….

The only thing to do to avoid succumbing to the lure of the snooze,  is to just MAKE something. Anything! Even if I have no ideas, and without caring about the outcome terribly much. And that, really, is the whole point of my Making Fridays: just make SOMETHING because it’s time to show up and MAKE STUFF!

Of course, a heck of a lot of what I generate just sits about, with no real direction, and so I end up with piles of printed patterns and drawers full of papercuts, doodles and ideas that will go further than that. But occasionally some of these anti-napping things I generate  actually end up becoming designs. Here’s a record of a pretty effective day I had in my studio recently,  as I did my best to avoid succumbing to the lure of the zzzz:

I got started by making a sketchbook doodle. Flowers are a frequent go-to for my doodling, and I’d been drooling over Makoto Kagoshima’s flowery ceramics lately. After looking at it for a bit…

….. I decided to simplify by tracing all the elements and then cutting through the tracing paper onto black paper with my sharp, sharp knife ….

.. I pinned all the negative shapes up on my pinboard and.admired them for a while.

Then the cut flowers and the leftover bits of cut tracing paper caught my eye and I started fiddling with them too, enjoying the overlay and transparency. Hmm…. I think an idea is starting to form…

I scanned the flower pieces and turned them into Illustrator files…

: … and I started playing around with transparency, colour, layout, repeats…

… and also with turning the design in multiple directions and experimenting with overlays and more colours. It’s come quite a long way since starting as a doodle, right?

And there it is! My Making Friday (a.k.a Idea-generating Practice) performed its function. Want to know more about it? Read all about what Making Friday here.

PS: I must admit that sometimes do just have a snooze. It’s really nice.