It was very cool hearing from Abdul last week. I really enjoyed hearing from someone that was closer to my age than other speakers, as well as someone that seemed early in their creative career and was still figuring things out and learning a lot on the fly. I was looking at his Instagram after he spoke and noticed that we have many mutual friends so that it was cool having someone I could relate to a little more. I also saw that he had worked on music videos with a few of my favorite local artists which is really cool.
Abdul spoke a lot about how his work constantly requires him to roll with the punches and adapt to unforeseen challenges. In life, you can put a lot of effort into planning, but sometimes you need to throw those plans away in order to make things work. That can be really hard because you put so much time and energy into making that plan and you don’t want that effort to go to waste, but sometimes it is a necessary evil. This makes me think of a project I had last quarter in Illustrator class. It was a project where we had to make a graphic translation of an object of our choosing. To create the image we could only use black and white so we had to use only the shaded and highlighted values of the image. After getting the assignment brief, my plan was to build shapes using the shape tool then modifying those shapes using the shape-builder tool as well as the pathfinder tool. That was the plan. But once I began building the shapes I got too frustrated and wanted to throw my computer out the window. After taking a few breathers to get my head straight I took a completely different approach and took a crack at building shapes using the pen tool. That was much easier to build the compound shapes to fit the shadows and highlights of the truck I was translating. Once I got rolling I couldn’t stop because I was getting so into it and ended up working ’til 1:30 am without realizing it. So the lesson I took from that experience is to remain calm when you get frustrated and always try to think of alternative solutions to problems you are having. Also, don’t get hung up on doing something a certain way because once you start the task you are planning for it might not go as you thought it would. Despite the frustration and long hours, I was happy with how the project turned out.