It’s been ages since my last post and I figured I should get back to blogging here. I don’t think I mentioned but I also started a blog with Caleb. Anyway, 2015 was crazy—in a good way— and I cannot help but hope for 2016 to get crazier the same way.
It was July of last year when I officially embraced the role of a designer. The pursuit of creative work is something that took a long, long time for me to start. The road to it was confusing and was often times frightening. It was a battle and up to now, I still gets fits of doubt every so often. But more than anything, I am thankful that the Lord took me here. It’s pretty amazing how He led me to this, actually.
For the longest time, my works sat on my hard drive and on pages of notebooks that I’m pretty sure I stored somewhere. The blessing came in the form of a wedding coordinator who was my sister’s student-turned-friend; she gave me my first design job. Thinking of it, my sister is the bigger blessing because she touted my skills.
So my first paid stint was to design a wedding invitation. For a first, I was understandably anxious. But I love paper and I love stationery, so it also got me really excited. The wedding theme though was a rather odd mix, beach & black-tie; so yeah, it was challenging to make it work. I started by making watercolor washes for the background and some calligraphy for the names and headings. I’m pretty happy with how my initial design turned out but it got rejected. FIRST DESIGN REJECTION EVER! I usually don’t handle rejection well, but I surprised myself this time. I just shrugged it off and revised as instructed. After a lot of exchanges, changing of layouts and minds, the final output was this:
It isn’t much but you know what they say about firsts, and this started it all. I cannot say that an avalanche of design work came after; but for somebody who still has a day job, I got a manageable number to work on.
It’s true that you have to give it a go before you’re ready. When my sister’s friend gave me this project, I listed and recited in my head a number of reasons (read: excuses) not to take it. If I continued with my resisting and arguing my unpreparedness, I probably would not get my work out there EVER. Again, it was scary. It was uncomfortable. It did not give me enough sleep. I still get little sleep up to now, but it’s totally worth it. In my more than six years of jumping to and fro jobs and companies, I never found myself truly delighted in what I am doing—never looked at a computer screen with real sparkles in my eyes (not glare!) until I did design.
Today, I continue to do mostly wedding invitations. As I try to keep this blog alive again, I will try to share each of the works that I come up with. Hopefully, you guys get to enjoy them!
So there. HELLO AGAIN.
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