The Impact of Daily Practices

As you may know, I am a recent art school graduate. This past school year was my senior year and during that time I started a daily practice. Now, it was required for my Senior Studio classes, but even so I found this to be a pleasant and enjoyable way to explore new creative ideas!

My professor barely put any restrictions on this! I was free to do WHATEVER I wanted to do, and boy did I take full advantage of this.

To start us out we were given some prompts to do earlier on in the year. One of the prompts that turned out to be really helpful was to choose an action verb. I chose "to slice". With this action, I started to "slice" into paper with my X-acto blade, creating textures and simple patterns. From there I started to play with overlaying these paper cut outs with different textures and materials behind them. And off of that, I started thinking about adding yarn and thread into these "sliced" areas. In the image above, you can see some of the results from these ideas. In the center, I continued to explored my idea of drawing motifs from ancient metalwork (which is something I was exploring simultaneously with these material explorations). I framed this small illustration with fringe coming out of small sliced areas. In the two daily practices on either side, I explored weaving braided yarn into paper, securing it with embroidered squares.

In these daily practices (pictured on the right), I started to think about integrating delicate patterns with these material studies and how might that, visually, interact with more illustrative motifs.

From this point, I started to think about my chosen "concept" (which was Ancient Rome) and how I might use that specifically as inspiration in patterns, materials, motifs, and even in form. This lead me to think about coffered ceilings...

Coffered ceilings, such as the example shown below, were used often in Roman architecture, not just as a decorative element but also as a way to lighten the weight of a ceiling. In this example, the Pantheon in Rome, it was meant to do just that. Even in this simplistic case, the pattern is quite lovely.

Pantheon- Ceiling Detail, Image found on Pinterest

In the past, as far back as my high school years, I have pulled inspiration from various Roman coffered ceilings, incorporating it as the background in drawings to add decorative pattern, but I wanted to start to explore it through material. This led me to this daily practice, pictured to the left.

Instead of weaving the thread through sliced areas in the paper, I woven it through pieces of brass tubing to give the more 3-dimensional look of a coffered ceiling. And, in an attempt to secure the thread, I also pulled the thread pieces through cut areas in the paper, taping and glueing it in the back.

I consider this daily practice to be one of my favorites as this led me to utilize this technique in not one but two projects in my senior thesis! Which leads me to my final point and the title of this post...

All of that thought and work I put into these daily practices, created with no other purpose but to create and think through ideas, lead me to a technique and to a style which I used in finalized projects. For example...

These three swatches on leather, which you might recognize are pulled directly from daily practices on paper. (You can see more from this project here).

And a little later down the line, this handmade bag that utilized that same weaving-through-brass-tubing technique. (More from this project here)

Both these projects would not be the same without the impact of my daily practice. It is this lesson that I have carried on with me through the end of my college career and that I hope to keep up through my own personal studio practice.