Finding Joy in Creation Again
I felt something happen to me the longer I spent disassociating from my design work. It became easier to accept criticism, but it became harder to find that spark of inspiration to make a project great. I wasn’t enjoying the process of creating things and I could feel myself falling into the deep, dark Pit of Blanding. (As an aside, if you are unfamiliar with blanding, according to author Andrea Belk Olson, it is this: “the copy-paste model of consumer product development and brand marketing that follows repetitive patterns in the name of modernity but at the expense of authenticity and originality. With results that are, in a word, bland.”) The Pit of Blanding may not be the most glamorous place, but I could settle in there. That’s all I’d do in those moments. Settle. The longer I separated myself from my design, the more I’d settle. I had to stop being complacent and work at finding the spark of joy I used to get whenever I engaged in the processes of creation and design.
To find joy in creation again, I pulled out my favorite art materials (a sketchbook and stamp-carving tools), armed myself with simple concepts (favorite phrases and basic imagery that correlates), and sat down to move my hand until my brain caught up. The phrase I chose to explore was “memento mori.” It’s a very fitting Latin phrase that means “Remember you must die.” It is ominous but serves as a reminder that nothing is permanent, and you must live as well as you can each moment you have. That phrase speaks to me in moments of stagnation; hence I picked it when I was feeling creatively stuck.
After I have chosen a concept to explore, I always start in the physical dimension even when creating something that will briefly translate to the digital. Normally I sketch at least two pages of concepts before taking a design to the next stage, but this instance was unusual, I was finding joy in creation again, and I only sketched two concepts before ultimately finding I was happy with my first one.
Next, I transferred the pencil drawing to soft rubber and carved out the stamp. This step might be the most meditative of a creative process. Unfortunately, I got so into the process that I forgot to take any pictures of me carving the actual stamp. While that is a detriment to documentation, it is a sign that I was finding joy in creation again! Flow was coming back to me.
My stamp was complete and all I needed to do was use it! Wielding a stamp in one hand and an ink pad in the other, I let loose on some sheets of Bristol paper. This stamping action was another step that lent itself well to getting lost in creation. Ink, place, press, lift… and so on.
The final part of this project brought me to the computer. It was time to take what I had made and “finish” it. Creating the stamp and stamping it on paper did not feel like all that I could do. I felt there was more potential for this stamp than just to collect dust in my box of hand-carved stamps. The first step for bringing my physical art into the digital realm was scanning it. I carefully fed each piece of paper with the various iterations of my “memento mori” stamp through my printer’s scanner. I collected the imagery at three hundred dpi to zoom in on every bit of texture and every “imperfection” that comes with making something by hand. I didn’t want to lose the heart of this art or else it would defeat the exercise of finding joy in creating again. I opened each image in Photoshop and was pleased with my source material. It was time to edit.
The important part is that through each change I made I got closer to the finished design and felt good while doing it.
The process of futzing with a design in the digital realm is a lot less interesting if you’re not the one doing the futzing, so I won’t go into terrible detail about each step involved or every adjustment layer/deletion/scale/color change that my source stamp imagery went through. But! The important part is that through each change I made I got closer to the finished design and felt good while doing it. I didn’t think about how it would be received by someone else, nor did I stop and scrap everything because it was deviating too much from something tried and true, and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it look finished if I pursued something so different. I came out with one design in six variations and decided how I wanted that design to be implemented: as stickers! And it felt good. I felt good. I made something punchy and was joyful while I did so.
I don’t know if I got that spark of joy back because I did something creative without a plan, because I entered a meditative state while engaging in the process, because it was a design for me first, or just because I made a conscious choice to feel good about creating and designing again; but I got it back. In the future when I feel myself getting detached from my work again, perhaps I’ll go back to my roots and just engage in a process of creation—hands first, mind second—because ultimately there is joy in it, and I deserve to feel that about what I make.
Please enjoy photos of my process (that I remembered to take), and check out my “Memento Mori” stickers on Redbubble using the link below!
Belk Olson, Andrea. “Why Brands Are Blanding.” LinkedIn, 27 Oct. 2022, www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-brands-blanding-andrea-belk-olson-msc/.