CLEAR VISION MAKING
This article aims to draw a parallel between the creative process in business and art. Most of us spend our days navigating the decision-making process as we work to build and diversify. I sincerely hope this explanation of how I made this artwork helps you break down the steps in your creative process. For me, it's about looking at things in taggable stages because if you classify them, you control them.?
I am a business person and an artist, and recently, in my career, I have been feeling an incredible crossover in how they flow with each other. 2022 marks 21 years as a working artist, and I have built a professional career developing lasting relationships and businesses. My 10,000 hours are more than complete, and I feel like I'm just starting the excellent stuff. After thousands of sketches, untold digital graphics, terabytes worth of sales materials, a handful of memorable logos, long-forgotten websites, and hundreds of paintings, I finally see a productive workflow that is refined and unique to my craft. And I find it's all about rock-solid planning before you begin. Some painters can sit down at a blank canvas and create a masterpiece on the spot. However, it is abundantly clear that I am not that person.
CLEAR AND REALISTIC VISION MAKING
Constantly working on refining my creative process helps me define a vision and illuminates the stepping stones leading to a successful end goal. Spending extra time thinking slowly about an idea can help eliminate redundant or unnecessary steps while avoiding time-consuming and costly errors, which I have made many. Some of those mistakes still bother me in the middle of a sleepless night. Early in my career, having the "grand vision" was easy; I thought that was all I needed. However, executing it almost always came with mixed results and sometimes a long timeline due to my inexperience. One must know what tools they have and at what level they know how to use them. These days, I thoughtfully and carefully refine my initial vision into something that fits reasonably within my skill set while still challenging myself and pushing forward. From this point on, ill explain my process in getting to the digital illustration you see before you.
STARTING FRESH AND CLEAN
While travelling, I always start a sketch with a sharp pencil on a clean page in my black book. Travelling fills my senses with new sights, sounds, cultures, and experiences essential to fresh ideas. That sense of adventure, new surroundings, and hopefully in proximity to a beach relaxes my mind into this state where new ideas present themselves to the front of my mind. Unfortunately, that sketch may stay in the pile of books for years until I flip back through one day, looking for a forgotten concept. This Heron was from four years ago when I was in Mexico visiting my Mom in Loreto Bay. I snapped a photo of it while I went on a birdwatching tour early in the morning and sketched it later that day. I have seen Herons before in Canada, but in this sacred setting, the Baha, it hit differently. It's fantastic there, by the way. Last week I found this drawing, so I scanned it, cleaned the bitmap in photo editing software, converted it to black and white and printed it off.
My favourite stage is the next one, outlining it with a crispy new Faber Castel black artist pen. At this stage, the flow of the drawing happens, and if I mess it up, I can stay at this stage and repeat the process until It feels right. I try hard not to rush in this because it's an essential foundation and very enjoyable. This step is satisfying because you can feel the excitement while letting the idea crystallize and possibly snap on other ideas complementing it. In the case of this drawing, I added the background image called "The Water Mandala," which I had archived in 2003 when I lived in the South Pacific. After that, I scan it again, fine-tune the bitmap, and turn it into vector line art. Seeing how the computer takes my line art and translates it into a clean, refined product with unexpected improvements is always interesting. Technology is a valuable tool for improving your creative processes. From this point, I can work on line weight and colour options while tweaking the design. Vectors are super versatile and translate into any medium or product. But mostly, I like turning them into stencils and paintings.?
This digital work is my rendition of the majestic Great Blue Heron, and I create these digital prints so I can archive them or translate them onto apparel, a product like a mug, or prints that I can sell in the future. But mostly, they are the final colour plan before the last part of the project, which is usually a large mixed media painting using acrylic, stencils, paper, and spray paint. That is an entirely different set of skills and the start of another process.
Define the places where you do your best thinking, archive ALL of your ideas, map out the stepping stones that will define your process, ritualize your tools and methods, and actualize your extraordinary, one-of-a-kind visions!
Thank you for taking the time to read this and look at my "Great Blue Heron.?
"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." Vincent Van Gogh
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