Unless you're reading this via your RSS feed, I'm sure you've realized that there have been a few slight tweaks to my site design.  Apparently a lot of people haven't seen the weird eyeballs I'd made as postcards last year, and as they seem to fit in with the mood of the site I've stuck them in there.  Those who have seen them sometimes ask, "Why eyeballs?"  Though they usually ask that after saying "Weird."

These eyeballs were an obsession of mine last year for about a month.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, but I felt driven to create them after seeing this piece by Derek Prospero, a digital artist in Florida.  Something about the rusty gear and the techno pupil drove me into a frenzy of Photoshopping.  I didn't want to recreate what he'd done, but create my own interpretation of the feelings it evoked in me.

It's not as if I was looking for anything in particular, but something about that image really resonated.  It made me feel creative. That sometimes happens with certain guitarists I listen to, and it makes me want to write and play music.  Though I have yet to find a band that makes me want to draw or a picture that makes me want to strum, I understand it's possible.  

The point is, inspiration can happen specifically when you're not looking for it.  Or rather, when you're always looking for it.

"How effing Zen," I hear you say.  "But how does it work?"

Okay, man.  Do you want a hug?

It's a frame of mind that allows you to process information through filters you've set up by immersing yourself in the ouvre of a project.  Surround yourself with the keywords, images, and even logos of the project, then leave them behind and visit the world. 

Often the initial concepting for a project I won't even touch my computer after thoroughly reading the creative brief worksheet.  I'll go about my life for a day or two, but in the back of my head it's all churning around.  Everything I see is through the filter of my next project.  Then I'll happen on something (once it was a billboard, once it was a desk, often it's things I see on the internets) and in a flash I get that feeling of rightness, a visual or conceptual description of the morass in my head.  Things get weird when I'm working on more than one project at a time.

It's a state of being receptive, open to everything coming into your senses and filtered by knowledge.  A lot of creative exercises involve limiting your field to one item and seeing how many different ways you can treat it.  Still lifes are an example.  What I'm talking about is the opposite--not focusing on one thing, but opening up to everything and like a whale eating krill, skimming all that information off the surface until something sticks in my baleen.  

Yes, I said baleen.

Once the dust settled on my weird eyeballs, I was hesitant to use them to promote my business.  A few were, after all, borderline gross.  I hadn't approached them as a project with a purpose but as a pure artistic process.  That's why they don't really work as promotional material for 3232.  But they still make me stare at them.

So I'm putting them up for you, dear reader.  Maybe you'll be inspired to create something of your own.