Valuble artistic advice

Again, I have been hooked on the videos of Tales of Mere Existence and I feel that this is something worth sharing among FCM students.

The video talks about instead of thinking and worrying about the outcome of things, especially when it comes to doing artwork, just DO IT, DO SOMETHING, DO ANYTHING. Do not worry if it turns out uncool, make your own uncool. Make “your own” your own world. That is the really the best advice I have ever got as a design student.

Usually I am confined to the rigid ways of generating ideas. I do studies and find references that can help me in creating a good design but most of the times, it just appears to be boring or typical or ‘this looks familiar…’ then I am trap in a mind block and I don’t know what to do because I cannot proceed without getting the very basic idea done first. I would lie around or waste my time doing something else other than work. This is when procrastination kicks in. I mentioned before that procrastination is a natural thing that comes to us and it’s best to combat it by thinking about the consequences faced if we procrastinated. Now take that imagination of consequences and add to the frustrating feeling of not being able to produce anything which forced you to procrastinate in the first place and you get a high blood pressure and heart tightening feeling called STRESS (or it could be a heart attack coming)

At time like these, I do what the video says: “Learn to say F*** you to the world once in a while. You have every right to” and I just make a mind map of things and just start drawing any crap I want WITHOUT worrying if it followed the requirements or if it would appeal to the lecturer or not. At the end of it, at least I am doing work and not procrastinating and I might get something close to a potential final design. Usually it works for me, if I like what I just drawn even though it was produced in a ‘backward method’ of results first, studies and references later, I would have kept the design for submission anyway. And if it is out of the requirements, there is always modification.

Yes, honestly, I do that sometimes, not everything comes if you follow the ‘procedures of creative thinking’, since when did generating ‘creative ideas’ became so rigid anyway? I personally feel that all the talks and workshops are just one of the myriad ways to generate ideas. I believe that good ideas can be spawned from a chaotic and unorganized situation and be dressed like it was conceived in an organized and procedural manner. Does that make sense to you? I hope it does, all I want to say to designing students and NO OFFENCE to lecturers that, DO whatever is fine for you to generate ideas. Not sticking to what you learn in the classroom is your own decision and if the results are good then who cares about the process of how it came anymore?

So just DO. DO SOMETHING, DO ANYTHING.