Two Chairs, One Postcard, Big Hurry

Rumi

Here’s another postcard I sent to a fellow member in my Postcard Exchange group. I think I overworked it a bit, and I thought it might be useful if I talked about that here.

I was trying to get it done too fast because I was down to the wire–we are supposed to get them out by the end of the month and I was teetering on the edge of being late.

The Process

I went through my drawings and bits,  scanned a drawing of a chair I had done and copied it. I added a third image to the background, resized to fit my postcard base, and printed it out. I then added a coffee cup stain (a recurring motif for me).

I stared at it for a while and it felt like something was missing. I thought, this is a postcard, I’ll add a message. So I took a part of one of my favorite Rumi poems (“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing/there is a field./I’ll meet you there”). I loooovvvve his poetry and would like to do a whole series of work based on those particular lines. I printed it out again.

Knowing When to Stop

I decoupaged this final printout onto a small piece of of Baltic Birch plywood that was an off-cut from another project. Love Baltic Birch–so flat and smooth. I still felt like something was missing, so I kept going. I collaged some pattern tissue, added color, and experimented with a very faint heart shape in the middle. Was it right? Was I done? I wasn’t sure, but I was running out of time so I gave it a few coats of gloss medium and sent it out.

Afterwards, I decided I liked it better before I started collaging more things on it.  I think if I had had more time, I would have changed the scale of a couple things–like the words, and the heart and maybe cleaned up the color a bit. But, since I wasn’t sure and I was concerned about being late, I sent it out with along with my vague misgivings. Whaddyagonnado?

I share this because I think it’s good to talk about the process, even when it’s about something you made that isn’t your favorite but still managed to escape out into the world anyway (it’s easier when we hide these things at home). This is different from when you hate something–when you hate something, you usually make darn sure it doesn’t go anywhere, deadline or not.

It’s the things that we’re on the fence about that suffer when we rush. I think if I weren’t on a deadline, I would have waited when I felt something was missing–OR, my attitude might have changed in a day or two and I would have been happy as is. Or maybe I’d have chosen something else.

• Maxim #1: Hurrying never helps your art (or anything else for that matter).
  
• Maxim #2: Know when to stop and leave your art alone. (Or maybe it’s really, know when to wait. Which is hard when you’re in a hurry, because you’ve got to get it done.)
  

That second one might be the hardest. When you make things, so often it takes longer than you anticipate to finish until suddenly, you’re out of time–their birthday is tomorrow, the play needs that backdrop for the dress rehearsal, or perhaps your boss is waiting (if you make things for a living) and you kind of have to live with what you’ve got.

Have you ever made something that you’ve given someone and every time you’re at their house and you see it, you want to take it home and fix it? Or just take it home? Give them something else instead? That’s definitely happened to me, as my family has things I’ve made them all over their houses. Of course, the reverse can also happen, I’ll run across something I’ve made that I haven’t seen in a long time, and be pleasantly surprised by how much I still like it. That’s the best of course, it’s like running unexpectedly into an old friend you lost track of, and being relieved when they still look good.

P.S. The Importance of a Little Distance

Speaking of that kind of good surprise, it happened for me just now. I wrote the draft of this blog post a while back, right after I finished the postcard. I hadn’t looked at it again until just now, a couple of months later. And I realized, as I read the post again and was looking at the image of my card, that I actually like the final outcome more now, than I did when I just finished it.

A little distance can be so helpful when we’re making things–sometimes we think something didn’t “work” because it didn’t come out the way we planned, or maybe because we felt rushed or just not inspired.

Did I just say the “i” word? There’s a complicated bugaboo. I mean, we all love to feel inspired.

And yet, years of designing and making things for a living (and, therefore, on a deadline), have taught me that inspiration is not required to make something good. It feels great, but it’s not required. The making skills are always there, no matter how we feel or what our mood.

But that’s another blog post for another time!

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