At school we've started our individual projects for the semester. Above is my "concept-moodboard", where I tried to organize my school work from this semester and everything that interests and inspires me right now into a mind map, to help me figure out the theme for my project. The central keywords are "virtual - space - aliens - magic - monocoque - archetypes".

We have to create 3 looks, and I chose 3 tarot cards as the basis for the three looks: the Magician, the High Priestess and the Empress.

Except I changed the magician's gender and made her a witch. These three characters are the archetypes I want to research and work with.

At the moment we're all in the "research" phase, meaning we have to research our theme,  experiment with materials, silhouettes & colors, and test ways to present the looks (we have to come up with a key visual). We have to produce as many sketches as possible. And by sketch I don't just mean illustrations or drawings, but also photographs, collages and three dimensional sketches, basically anything to visualize and test an idea.

I'm struggling with this a bit, especially the presentation part (whe have to present the looks to our teachers and make a key visual). I know that to test an idea, discuss it with other people and compare it with my other ideas, I have to have some visual representation of it. But I find it frustrating when these sketches don't live up to the images in my head, so I spend way to much time on trying to perfect them. Time I don't have, because it's quantity over quality at this stage, and I shouldn't be wasting so much time and energy on an idea that might not be the right one.

I used to have the same problem with sketching (and this time I mean 2D drawing). But once it "clicked" in my head that a sketch is more of a means than an end, I started to really enjoy it, because I didn't put so much pressure on myself (also, I realized I dislike pencils and much prefer fineliners!). I was more relaxed about it, if became fun, I did it more often and I started to get better. I also started to really like the imperfections in my sketches. I hope I'll get to that point with design research as well.

Since this is pretty much all I'm doing right now, I'll be sharing the process here. I don't have time for "personal projects" next to school work at the moment, so the blanket coat will have to wait...

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