Any time that I am enthused to create, the adversary of self doubt rallies its armies and orders the attack on my newly found inspiration. A battle ensues and my focus no longer goes into the project or idea at hand. Instead all resources are directed and invested in a war against invisible enemies – good old Major Doubt and General Fear.
If you have battled with self doubt, you will know what I mean!
I mention this because the creepy fairy Icon at the top of the page was somehow born during such a war.
Here’s how… First came the idea, I wanted a creepy and mysterious silhouette of a fairy for my blog. I set some expectations way up in the clouds and began comparing and gathering inspiration from expensive brand logos and established artists’ works of wonder.
I began to sketch concepts. Over and over nothing worked, nothing matched up to what I wanted. I had a shaky concept and a whole lot of beautiful and inspiring reference but none of the reference matched exactly what I wanted. So I went back to search for reference that matched my shaky concept to a T. Needless to say, I found no such thing.
This is because I wanted something original.
I had to come to the conclusion that inspiration and reference was there to be drawn on and (here it comes) referred to, not copied.
Still, my concepts seemed to be repeating themselves and Major Doubt and General Fear were winning battle after battle in the war in my mind. I continued to attempt to thwart their advances by churning out more and more almost identical concepts. This didn’t help and I was about ready to concede defeat.
While taking a defeatist break, I read through the first chapter of Ann Rand’s book ” The Art of Fiction”.
“If you are not clear at all – if you have nothing but ‘floating abstractions’ in your subconscious (by that I mean abstractions which do not connect to concretes) – you will sit and stare at blank paper. Nothing will come out because you have put nothing into it.”
Ann’s view point helped me, despite my natural aversion to her usually self glorifying air. I removed my self from my work station and reflected. What I was trying to achieve was a creepy fairytale like silhouette of a fairy, more wasp-based than butterfly. At the same time I was attempting to pull off a simple small iconic logo.
Another issue was that I was drawing the concepts at the size I imagined it would be once in use instead of a size where I could see properly what I was doing.
For my fairy to be born before the armies of doubt marched in and destroyed the remains of my morale,
I abandoned the logo focus, conjured more clearly in my mind what I wanted to see on paper, found precise and relevant reference and drew something in full scale. From there I turned the image into a silhouette and at last, sent the enemy armies into retreat (to wait until the next project inspiration arrived).
her waking world 