One of the most difficult things about taking a course that focuses on creativity, problem solving, and concept based work is figuring how to properly execute an idea. Even when work isn’t being graded, it feels as though there is a tremendous amount of pressure to constantly be performing to the best of your abilities. Of course you should always be putting your best effort into your projects, but sometimes what you have completed to the best of your abilities may feel inadequate when compared side by side with your peers. When your work doesn’t match the level that you know you can produce or seems subpar, you may begin to feel defeated and out of place but it is important to use these experiences (and failures) to continue to grow and improve your skills.
So why am I focusing on failures right now? Well, one of my biggest struggles is how to properly execute a concept and the past two days have been especially full of comparisons amongst my peers. I started my week with a peer workbook review, and walking around the room looking at pages and pages of really well organized work made me feel pretty embarrassed about the quality of my workbook. However, I used this as motivation to begin to focus on moving my work from the digital platform I had been using, to my workbook. I began creating more collages and showed more of my creative process, and already I feel so much more confident about using my workbook and showing my ideas in it.
The bigger “failure” was on Tuesday. In our seminar, we were tasked with working in a small group or pair and creating a concept board using three randomly assigned words. Though it seemed fairly straight-forward at first, the task grew exponentially more difficult when we received the words “sky blue,” “umbrella,” and “serious” and were given the instructions to not take the words too literally. Right away, we experienced problems with the fact that all three words seemed to juxtapose each other. Our immediate associations with each word were “happiness” for sky blue, “rain” or “cover” for umbrella, and “strict” or “straight-forward” for serious. So the question became how do we make all these words align and share one concept?
As I began researching the origins of umbrellas and creating and color palette, my partner began creating a word map of associations with each word. After about 15 minutes of brainstorming, we found some words for each category that created our overarching concept: protection from negativity. Though looking at it now the idea seems basic and fairly common, it’s pretty incredible that this is the concept we arrived at from three words that had seemingly no relationship to each other. With our concept determined, the next step was creating an actual board to demonstrate these terms. And, after 40 minutes of finding images and editing them in photoshop, we were feeling pretty disappointed with the result.
Our board, especially in comparison with the other boards done by our peers, seemed empty and didn’t fully represent our concept in the way that we wanted it to be represented. Our ideas had included lovers shrouded in a sky blue to symbolise happiness and protection from the evils of the rest of the world, people diving with sharks in a cage where the shark would be a darker blue (an association with sadness and evil) and the cage would be a light blue to once again symbolize protection. With our concept, we were planning on having the umbrella be more figurative as a form of protection from the seriousness and negativity in the world. The final result didn’t even seem to touch on this concept.
Luckily, this assignment was meant for experimenting with photoshop and coming up with new ideas for brainstorming and idea generation, so it wasn’t graded. Without the pressure of the board being graded, there is no reason to dwell on how disappointing the final result was. That doesn’t mean I will forget the process and result completely, rather I am taking it as a valuable learning experience teaching me that I should be realistic with my time constraints and current photoshop abilities.
Mia Leff 