Tien Chiu

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May 25, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Brainstorming

I had a lovely time in Oregon, teaching my “Power Up Your Process” workshop and giving a talk on brainstorming. I thought I’d share some of the ideas in the talk with you, as I think they address some common misconceptions about brainstorming.

First, brainstorming is NOT about creating a work of art. My brainstormed designs all look like they were drawn by a six year old child. In fact, I’m pretty sure a six-year-old could produce better art, given time. But brainstorming is not about taking time to create a great portrait. Brainstorming is about getting as many ideas as quickly as possible – so whatever captures the idea fastest is the best method for brainstorming. In my case, it’s a fast and largely incoherent scrawl.

To demonstrate, here are a few of the brainstormed designs for my piece “Goodbye, Ma,” plus the finished piece.

I knew I wanted a phoenix rising out of something, so I started with some thumbnail sketches to show different poses for the bird. Each of these took only a few seconds, and I didn’t stop to think or adjust details. The sketches are crude, but they were perfect for the occasion, giving me a collection of ideas in just a few minutes.

cropped thumbnails for Goodbye, Ma
cropped thumbnails for Goodbye, Ma

Next I took some of my favorite poses and sketched them roughly in black and white. Each sketch took less than a minute.

Thumbnail sketches for my piece "Goodbye, Ma"
Thumbnail sketches for my piece “Goodbye, Ma”

Next I took some of my ideas and developed them a little more. Here are a few variants, each of which took about 5-10 minutes:

phoenix brainstorming - rising from flames
phoenix brainstorming – rising from flames
phoenix brainstorming - rising from black hole
phoenix brainstorming – rising from black hole

After I was done brainstorming, I started developing the piece. Here’s the first iteration – just the overall pose and a hint of shading:

initial development of phoenix drawing
initial development of phoenix drawing

After doing that version, I added some shading, and added some blue to “pop” the oranges.

second iteration - light and shadow
second iteration – light and shadow, complementary color

Around this point I realized that it would be great to have the phoenix flying out of a cremation urn, rather than just appearing out of nowhere. So I added a crude sketch to check positioning, and also changed the wing feathers around a bit, experimenting.

phoenix - flying up from urn
phoenix – flying up from urn

Having checked the positioning, I drew in the urn and re-revised the wings to look a bit more fiery:

phoenix with a better-drawn cremation urn
phoenix with a better-drawn cremation urn

I felt that the piece needed something to indicate that the phoenix was flying upwards, so I added a moon. I also straightened out the feathers and made them more stylistically compatible with the tail:

phoenix with added moon
phoenix with added moon

And in the final iteration, I decided to remove the feet, and made the blue feathers more plentiful. Here is the final drawing for “Goodbye, Ma”:

final sketch for Goodbye, Ma
final sketch for Goodbye, Ma

And here is the finished piece:

"Goodbye, Ma"
“Goodbye, Ma”

Coming back to the start again, here is the first brainstormed sketch:

cropped thumbnails for Goodbye, Ma
cropped thumbnails for Goodbye, Ma

I used to despair because my brainstormed sketches looked so crude. But now I’ve realized that that’s exactly what they should be. The idea is to test many ideas, so you can select the best one to develop further. Childish scrawls are perfect.

Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving, meditations on craft Tagged With: brainstorming, design

October 16, 2009 by Tien Chiu

The Loss of the Creature

(inspired by Walker Percy)

Like the insidious whispers issuing from beneath the pillows of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, modern society surrounds us with the message of mass-production: “Let us do it for you. Let us free you from drudgery, let us provide you with all you need. Buy our microwave dinners, our Levi’s, our molded plastic chairs. We’ll do it all for you, so you can have time for the things you want.” Yet, at the same time, we value the handmade far above the mass-produced product: a painting may sell for $2 million while the same image on a poster costs less than $10. Surely we must see something greater, more worthwhile in the efforts of the artist, the craftsman, to value the results of his or her labor so highly! And yet we surround ourselves with anonymous objects stamped out by the millions, and see nothing wrong, offer no resistance to the tide of uniformity.

I stand on tiptoe beneath a flowering orange tree, ignoring puzzled glances from passersby as I pluck its fragrant blossoms. After filling my bucket, I take my booty upstairs, where I hand-sort blossoms from ants and leaves before dropping them into warm oil. The oil will extract the fragrance, producing a gloriously scented massage oil. I make many of my own perfumes the same way, for I find them more satisfying than store-bought colognes and floral oils. Bought fragrances seem somehow impersonal, uninteresting, and I avoid them when I can. Similarly, I sew and dye many of my own clothes, and would try my hand at weaving, had I a loom. Prepackaged foods have no place in my kitchen, for how can I truly appreciate food worth no more than five minutes in a microwave, two seconds of my time? I seek to reclaim the everyday, rather than pursue the exotic.

Perceptions differ according to expectations. The tourist who reads about the Tour Eiffel, sees the pictures in the travel brochures, and then visits the tower itself in Paris is unlikely to see it in the same manner as the innocent who, having never heard of it, turns a corner and is suddenly confronted with tall, sweeping curves of black steel. One might even argue that the tourist, in hunting for the Eiffel Tower, has lost it: what he or she experiences is not the tower itself, but a structure which looks remarkably like the travel brochure’s photo–a less than perfect example of the abstract idea, “Eiffel Tower”. An intermediate–the travel agency–has interposed itself between the tourist and his/her experience: instead of a glorious aesthetic creation, the tourist sees exactly what was expected: a three-dimensional copy of what has already been seen in brochures. The tower itself is lost.

In a similar sense, a woman who buys a mass-produced bar of soap in a supermarket, knowing it has been produced a million at a time in huge factories and is thus not at all special, has lost the essence of the soap: the very uniformity of the bar prevents her from apreciating the whiteness, the smoothness, the fragrance. It is not an object to be explored, but a plain, boring bar of Ivory. her preconceptions prevent her from seeing the actual object, replacing it instead with an idea of Ivory soap. She is not involved. The soap does not matter.

The hazards of objectification–the replacement of an object by an idea–are in some ways obvious. Any form of racial discrimination consists of replacing members of a group with the idea of the group, and refusing to see the individual. The ease and unconsciousness with which this objectification occurs frightens me: more than once, I have heard a group of men talking about women as a collection of sexual parts, then, realizing that I am present, immediately assure me that this view does not apply to me. But I cannot believe it: the category woman has been reduced to breasts and genitals, and I am a specimen of woman.

In a similar manner, I will not eat meat–not because killing is wrong, but because I object to hiding the slaughtering process. For me, buying prepackaged parts wrapped in styrofoam from my local supermarket entails a double loss of the animal. The first, the most obvious, is simply its death and dismemberment: it has been slaughtered, and so is gone. But the second loss disturbs me more: the absenting of the very concept, “animal”. The cuts of meat presented in neat cases bear little resemblance to the original creature, allowing me to eat steak without ever thinking of cow, or the bloody process that brings meat to the table. The calf, the pig, the hen disappear in the slaughtering process, replaced by veal, pork, chicken. In denying its ever having existed, the meat industry kills the animal a second, more brutal time. For me, this casual obliteration of animal-ness is more ominous than the actual slaughter: that six billion living, breathing creatures can disappear each year to go to our tables, without ever being allowed to exist in our minds, disturbs me deeply. For me, the anonymous hamburger brings up the process by which it arrives: the cramped animal factories, the slashing of a throat, the final dismemberment–and I turn away. And yet it takes an effort of will for me to discard my ingrained assumptions–that meat grows in supermarket cases, and animals do not exist.

Finally, abstraction of mundane objects deprives us of our identity as individual creatures, of our sense of self-worth. When we lose the towering oak to the fine specimen of Quercus albans, when we lose our kneaded breads, the products of our own efforts, to an anonymous lump of processed flour and additives, we lose something of ourselves. Mass-production, fundamentally, sends the message, “This is not important; this is a convenience, a shortcut because the route does not matter.” And thus we lose our daily bread: what we eat is worth no more than five microwave minutes, and hence does not deserve our attention, our enjoyment, our discovery. We are reduced from people who can enjoy and savor food to machines which need to be refueled periodically, as quickly as possible. We, too, become objectified.

Refusing objectification, classification, abstraction has become an integral part of my life–perhaps, viewed negatively, an obsession. But I feel my reward for this refusal outweighs the cost in time: I know for myself that I am human, I am individual, and I cannot be abstracted. I know that things, basic things, are important, are worthy of time. I appreciate the hand-stitched skirt even as I spread it across the table and pull out the dyes.
© 1991, Tien Chiu

Filed Under: All blog posts, musings, writing, meditations on craft

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