What is my creative style?

I recently started reading, The creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, and immediately knew that this was something that I will read again and again. Even some of her work tips in the first chapter really resonated with me as an often times scattered creative type.

One thing that she spoke about, which I found personally significant was knowing your creative strengths. I looked at my artists bios, and my designs, and I thought , hmmm which are my stronger designs, which come easier to me, which are more creative ‘work’ for me to get a result I’m happy with.

As I started thinking about this, I made a list. I am a huge supporter of creative brainstorming, which for me often take the form of word association. So I looked at my designs and started writing down some descriptive words to describe them.

Contrast, design, elegant, fluid, bold, sharp, engaged, ornament, fussy, curve, decoration, graphic, frivolity, accent, form, shape, color, fashion, intricate…

As I wrote and wrote, I realized that my designs really fall into two camps, there are the ultra bold designs with flat color fields and loads of contrast, some overlap, but are really more about bold decorative silhouettes. Then there are the fussy ones. They are the really intricate designs that overlap and swirl and play off one another when they overlap. These designs are much harder for me to design. I take so much longer and second guess myself a million times, and therefore there are fewer of these.

Just knowing this about myself and my work, enabled me to really create a very cohesive Spring 2011 graphic tee shirt collection that was more about single pass designs that were bold with contrasting elements. This also saw my single best online sales month to date – I feel I can attribute that to new product photographs and my new Collection. Now with these designs, I can add more fussiness, more passes, more interplay of transparent colors. Just dividing up my design time this way has already enable me to have more creative output with to me a more cohesive collection.

-Kimm

KimmChi // Screen printed graphic tees + other women's clothing
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