Bricks and Walls
Solo Coffee
Solo Coffee.
These things are meant to be conversations, but today I find myself sitting alone. And so we have our first introvert edition of Coffee Sunday.
Like most days I was up at 4 am.
Today I’m sketching ideas for a portfolio piece on cheap copy paper, this will be an image the agency uses to represent my work for up to the next 12-18 months.
The last piece I did was very successful, but it is time for a refresher. The piece needs to showcase some of my strengths, but it also needs to declare the kind of thing I want to work on next.
Portfolio pieces tend to always become fragments of future work. So by building this piece, I’m in a way starting my future projects. And so what I choose to put into this portfolio, is choosing what my future projects will be. I have a file where I collect images as clues. One of my first steps was to browse that file picking out the ideas that might be interesting to expand on and noting them down with an icon and title.
These are themes that I’m interested in exploring, which are not the same as themes that I should be exploring.
By the time I got to my second sheet of paper, the icons started morphing into a bit of a scene. Again, these are ideas of what I could draw, not what I should draw.
By my third scrap of paper, I was drawing the icons straight into a scene. Once again something I could draw, but I wasn’t sure if it was something I should draw.
It’s Sunday, so by now I’m stepping away from the studio and doing my Sunday things with my family.
It’s 5 pm when I step into the studio again. Another cup of coffee, a lighter one. And now I work out what I should draw! I do this on a couple of mind maps. One to see where the natural progression of my work should be for example, if I’ve been commissioned to do 2 books about monsters, maybe I should lean in on the theme and draw Kaiju (Godzilla-level monsters) or I’ve done a scientific/historic book maybe I should draw biographies.
The result is a list of things that I SHOULD draw.
Alas…
And with these lists and sketches, I felt no closer to getting my portfolio piece done. I felt no better off than when I just started, and I had been brooding on this for days, I felt stuck. Like there was a brick wall in front of me.
I allowed myself to feel stuck, to feel all the things you feel when you try to make something from nothing. I didn’t rush to become unstuck, I embraced the stuckness. I used it as inspiration. I didn’t have to go around.
I was ready to start building, one brick at a time. And this piece is the first brick.
A micro version of what the larger thing will be. Some weird pairing of letters and images. Like a dyslexic alphabet poster. The line from preparation to the work itself only makes sense in a strangely personal way. To have done all the work I did and end up with a brick wall makes no sense at all.
And it makes perfect sense.
How do you manage to make even a brick wall interesting? I cant wait to see how the portfolio piece evolves