Creating Requires Sacrifice

I know, it's a melodramatic headline for this post, but it's true, creating requires sacrifice. Often times that sacrifice comes at the cost of sanity. Maybe you're learning a new program (currently I am learning 3), maybe your designs aren't coming out exactly as you anticipated, or perhaps the printer isn't working the way it should be working and you're dealing with mess after mess.

The truth is that I believe that true creativity comes with it's own baggage, that failure is an unexpected necessity for creating something bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. One of the hardest things to grasp is making the leap from a visual idea in ones head and actually building it. Often times my mind gives me a really great outlook on a concept I am developing, but the minute I sketch it out, I am left with this bewildering feeling of "WTF! What were you thinking? This is just stupid."

Let's face it, the easiest part of an idea is dreaming it. The dream requires virtually no effort on the dreamers part. Expressing an idea out loud isn't really that much more different, but you have to be in a place of safety to share it. It is as I say that great leap from sharing to transcribing on paper where I find 80% of my ideas are just wishful thinking. The remaining 20% are have potential, but will require significant effort to design and produce. It's here in the creation of the final product that we determine whether the dream was indeed fruitful. With so much effort invested, it's easy to become frustrated and give up. Perseverance is needed to ensure that one crosses the finish line. It's often at this point where true creatives flourish or whither away. It's not easy to encounter failure time and time again without a loss of enthusiasm. Often times, this is where our sanity as artists are called into question.

This was my state over the weekend as I created piece after piece and ultimately the 3D Printer was the culprit, when in fact, it was really my failure as a designer to recognize that the piece I created was too light, not dense enough, required more than what I had produced. Regardless of having this epiphany, I was still feeling quite gutted as I was basking in my failure. The true artist moves on, learning the lesson, like a glassblower who watches their latest creation shatter.