When I get overwhelmed, I turn to counting. As I’ve been puttering away, day by day and piece by piece, my little experiments have added up to what might just be a body of work.
New Colors: 10
First, I played around with new color and texture combinations, making 10 new layered options for my palette.
Small Compositions: 52
Then, I layered those new colors with some of my small collages, adding in photographs for detail and focus, to see what would happen. So far, 9 definite winners, 7 or 8 more that I like a lot, and 52 total. Half of them are not making the first cut.
Large Works: 39
Using a larger base of texture as a starting point, I began added bigger pieces, with compartments of architectural detail, rooflines, and other elements that define a sense of place. Each bigger piece incorporates one or more of the smaller collage layers. As I worked on these larger compositions, I numbered them sequentially, and got up to 25, with multiple versions of several. There’s 1 clear winner, 9 more good candidates, and 39 total.
Total Trials: Over 100
As I prepare to nominate portfolio candidates — avoiding doing that right now by writing this post! — I’m looking at all the collected work for the year. As I try ideas out, they collect in a working folder called Current. Right now, even after eliminating almost 50 attempts, I have 66 possible compositions, 30 large and almost 40 small ones. I’m not going to start counting the number of edits on each file!
Pretty soon, it will be time to start puttering all over again: my 2015 portfolio will be populated, and my folder of current work will be emptied out. But when I wonder where all that puttering goes, sometimes it’s satisfying to take a minute and count it up.
Your “Current” folder triggered my source control curiosity. How do you name the files within Current? Do you title them right away and use that or just a date/time string or something? Do you maintain any alternate versions of a piece? Branches?
And on the other end of the process, you use so much source material for every piece. Is that stuff carefully organized or in an undifferentiated mound for serendipitous digging?
Source control — a great point! As I work on new ideas, I name them descriptively, maybe in a sequence. Definitely no titles to start — that comes all at the end. Since I work in Lightroom, it prompts me on versioning, which I can then override. Now I’m finally working on titles so, for example, LandscapeGrid6-Edit is about to become “comes first to the hill” — I think. :)
For the source material, again, I use Lightroom’s keywording and rating features to find what I need, and I try to stay within the last year’s worth of images. Exceptions made for compelling older pieces that match my digging.
And practically speaking, the Current folder is just to keep my file storage down, since my tiny laptop & its awesome SSD can only hold so much. The rest is on networked backups.