Guest Post: Precious Discards by Lesley

Today we have a fantastic guest post DIY!

I’m so excited to have guest posters (If you are interested in guest posting on my blog, just send me a message via the contact me button on the left side of the blog)

– Kendra

—————————————————————————–

Hi there! My name is Lesley and my home is designkitty, but I’m writing a post for Kendra while she enjoys a well deserved vacation!

In my spare time between my day job as an architect and my Etsy store, I like to fancy myself as an aspiring novelist.
I’ve always loved fantasy, ever since I was little, and so when I began to write, that was the genre I stuck with. In my eyes, fantasy is the ultimate escapism. You’re not constrained by the rules of the real world.
If you want your characters to be able to fly, you make it so. If lava is made of ice and fire falls from the sky like snow, well, that’s your world. I always feel a greater sense of freedom when I write than when it comes to screen printing, or sewing.

When I sew, I’m bound by the “laws” of thread and fabric, what my sewing machine is capable of, and even how sharp the needles and pins I use are. If I misjudge any of these things, I either ruin the end result, or I prick myself and bleed all over.
With screen printing my art knows only the boundaries of a pencil and my imagination, but the chemicals, equipment, and inks I work with have their own set of laws and boundaries. I can only mix half the colors I can imagine, and if I mis-print something it’s the bitter end. There is no delete button when working with ink.

But is a delete button necessarily a good thing? If I write something terrible, I delete it without thinking. It’s an immediate, almost visceral reaction.
It’s ew! I don’t like it.
Away it goes, leaving nothing but clean, white pixels behind it. I can do this in Photoshop and Illustrator as well.
Delete, delete, delete.
Wait.
What if I deleted something that could have been something more had I just allowed it to develop? What if I just missed out on the paragraph of a lifetime because I instinctively hit that button? What if I just wiped up an ink spill shaped like a dragon without even looking at it? Not every mistake is going to be a gold mine, but it’s a safe bet that at least some of them will.

I think the best thing about my three so-called jobs is that they cross-pollinate. I can write about a dragon, mentally design a stable that could hold ten of them, and then sit down and sketch everything I’ve just been thinking.
The clouds I absent mindedly doodle on my lunch break turn into a brand new pattern for fabric yardage. The heroine I imagine leaning against a tree beneath cloudy skies becomes inked artwork.

Despite the laws of each job, they thankfully manage to intertwine. It’s when they get caught in a snarl that the problems start. If I have some kind of creative block in one, it affects all of them.
All of a sudden my main character wants to stand around with her finger in her nose, I can’t get a set of stairs to look right in AutoCAD, and the pixels on my beloved Illustrator stay somewhat woefully blank.
The wrong kind of blank.
The question then becomes what to do when the river’s run dry? And the answer returns us to the delete key.

Save what you can, archive it, and return to it at a later date. I draw huge amounts of ideas an inspiration from stories that made it to the half-way point and then died.
I can pull pieces, re-write scenes, or just read to remind myself that hey, I don’t suck, and the dry spell will go away soon.
The same goes for prints I’ve made, things I’ve sewn that weren’t quite perfect, and old artwork.
Keep what you can of those precious discards. You never know when you’re going to need them!