Sunday 9 March 2014

Ideas 1, 2, 3 to 100

Today's post is going to be about the importance of refining and developing your ideas.

The reason I decided to write about it is because I spend a lot of time telling my students how important it is to come up with a variety of different ideas before making a final outcome. Every week and probably in most sessionz I'm telling them to come up with at least 3 different ideas and how their work will be improved for it, but as you have probably ascertained, they don't listen, or I wouldn't be saying it over and over again

I can preach this to my students because I know how important it is for me, as a maker of products. If I always went with the first idea that sprung into my head and didn't sketch it out first I would make a lot of rubbish and lose a lot of money!
So here is just a simple example of how I have played with ideas before refining and perfecting using Adobe Illustrator to create a final product. This image is now used for brooches, earrings, greeting cards and tote bags. They are selling well but if I'd chosen to use the first cat drawing at the top it may not have been so successful.

It can take a lot of thinking, experimenting, redrawing, and refining before I'm happy with an idea and it's a good job too. I have made the mistake of just screen printing first ideas in the past and those are definitely the products I now like the least and have to lower the price to sell.

Have you learnt this lesson the hard way as well? I wonder if my students will understand it one day!


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