I’ve been watching a lot of weekly vlogs on Youtube lately, by creatives and makers, and what I thought I would do is sort of replicate the same concept. However without the video but I guess with the written form of the voiceover. I literally just formulated this idea 10 seconds ago whilst moisturizing my hands so bare with me here, as we both figure out how this will unroll.

I am really keen on the idea of sharing my process in video footage but I feel like its an entirely new domain to learn, and every time I’ve had a crack at it, I’ve spent an excessive amount of time trying to get the right camera position and lighting, that it has completely derailed and stifled my creative process. And my interest definitely lies in the creative process and pursuit than to becoming a videographer, so I always end up abondoning it after a few hours of tampering, and just continue doing the creative thing I set out to do in the first place.

That being said though, maybe I’m getting closer with trial and error, and I just haven’t realised it yet, and someday it might just happen because I would have discovered that I have indeed been making progress on this front and it will seamlessly fall into place…

So here it goes, the attempt at a studio vlog in written form. Studio log? Or studio journal entry? Hopefully, I will have decided on something by the time my session and writing is over.

I’ve got a couple of hours up my sleeve this evening. My intent is to work towards finalising the release of some prints of modern leaf drawings/illustrations. Last Saturday, I released the original drawings of these modern leaf drawings on my online store, as well as on Bluethumb and Etsy. What I also want to do is also release the versions of these leaves that I have been working on in Adobe Illustrator.

I have a few concepts that I’ve created for the first couple of leaves in the range that I’m really fond of and I would like to make time to implement the same concepts for the remainder of the leaves in the collection. So that is my intent tonight and see how far I can get with it.

I still need to decide whether they will be released as prints, or as limited edition fine art (giclee prints). However, I sort of feel like this is dependant on the final designs I decide to release, so I’m going to complete the my design concepts and then make a final decision. I need to ultimately decide whether they will be released as prints at a lower price point, or as a fine art (giclee) print at a higher price point, as a limited edition range.

So let’s get started.

What I’m first going to do is take stock of where I’m at. I have 5 of these what I’ve called modern leaf drawings, and I have several variations of design concepts that I have been playing around with that I’ve turned into digital illustrations. I think I had 7 design variations at last count – so with 5 leaves x 7 design variations – I feel like I need to plan this and be more methodical and systematic to get my head around all the moving parts.

That being said, I’ve only done the first 2 leaves thus far, so I’ve only got about fourteen designs at the moment that I have been trying to keep on top of. But fourteen is still too many to keep all in my head. I like to keep clear and content and this just feels insanely opposite to that.

I did start using a Kanban board in Asana to keep track of these and where they were at in the development process eg. drawn, design concepts created, potentials for release (yes not everything progresses through), but even that is becoming hard to maintain.

I might just take the old fashioned route and export the layers from Illustrator to jpegs into the one folder, turn on thumbnail preview mode, and just keep track of what I’ve created thus far this way.

… one hour later…

Okay so it’s been an hour since I started and right now I have just completed exporting from Adobe Illustrator the design variations for the first two leaves. Whilst doing so, I’ve consolidated the design concepts I have so far, and although I’ve chopped and changed a few, I still currently have 7 design variations. I should also add the disclaimer that this is just me attempting to consolidate the ideas I’ve played around with the last few weeks and don’t represent the entirety of the concepts I wanted to explore that I captured in my Pinterest mood board for this series.

Concept 1 – black linework, white background, result organic of photo capture process and importing it into Illustrator (missing for Leaf 2)

Concept 2 – black linework 2px, empty shape fill, white background

Concept 3 – white linework 1px, solid black shape fill, white background

Concept 4 – (Concept 1) black linework 1px, solid white shape fill, muted colour solid background (yes I have totally just typecasted the first portion of that description to Concept 1)

Concept 5 – white linework 1px, empty shape fill, muted colour solid background

Concept 6 – white linework 1px, empty shape fill, black background

Concept 7 – (Concept 2), background abstract shape in solid muted colour

And I’m still not sure if I will focus on these particular design concepts/variations for this release or explore some more ideas based on the pins I collected on my Pinterest moodboard. Or I could alternatively leave these ideas and apply them to modern flower drawings in the future.

I also do want to pause the design and creativity tangent, and prepare these images for uploading onto the blog as renaming these files and adding tags etc does take time and I want to make sure I can close off this studio journal entry / studio log tonight.

So let me just upload the images onto my server and create the blog post for this entry, and we’ll see how we are going for time.

Okay so I’ve resized, resaved and uploaded the images to the server, but I got a WordPress database error whilst trying to save the draft of the blog post. Turns out I’m out of space on my droplet, so I need to resize it but to do so I need to power down my droplet. And I figured whilst I have it powered down, I might as well create a snapshot (backup) as well – which normally takes about 20 mins to complete. So I guess we are in a 20 minute interlude here, which I think is a good point to take a 5 min break to freshen up then come back to edit this post in Grammarly as I wait.

Okay so it’s taking longer than I expected and unfortunately, I have to go to bed to be fresh tomorrow to create a node package to replicate some databases from a couchdb server – which I’m really excited about. So I might just powerup the droplet in the morning and then continue with publishing this post tomorrow.

Until then,
Charlie x