Tien Chiu

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Learning CAD design!

I’m off on a little vacation right now, visiting family for a couple days in Maryland before looping up to New York City to visit my old friend Edouard for a few days. It’s a bit of a working vacation, but I’m also using some of the time for personal projects that I wouldn’t have time or focus for if I were at home, distracted by a zillion other things. One of them is (finally!) learning CAD design so I can create models for 3D printing!

The driver for this project is velvet weaving. My design-genius friend Dave came up with a design for a better velvet-weaving spool rack and tensioning system, but it requires some parts that are probably best 3D-printed. My esteemed spouse is currently busy doing other things, so I’ve decided to learn how to do my own designs for 3D printed objects. After all, how else am I supposed to design a 3D-printed flamethrower with which to take over the world? (Don’t worry, you can 3D-print in metal. I wouldn’t try to print a plastic flamethrower!)

Alas, the learning curve for CAD design software is as steep as the learning curve for Photoshop, so while at home I never had the peace, quiet, and free time to sit down and figure it out. While visiting family, though, I’ve got a lot more free time, so I spent about two hours this morning working my way through this excellent tutorial, and have now created this lovely stamp:

Fusion 360 screenshot
Fusion 360 stamp model

It was both far easier and far more complicated than I thought! I’m giving the knowledge a couple hours to settle into my head before tackling the next lesson. The author has a series, Learn Fusion 360 in 30 Days, on YouTube – I’m going to get through as many of the lessons as I can in the week that I’m traveling. I don’t need to become an expert in order to do the few simple projects I have in mind, but knowledge is never wasted!

Meanwhile, work on “Seasons of Creativity” continues. I think I’ve figured out how to do it with three painted-gradient wefts and one solid black weft. I may throw in some iridescent wefts for the butterflies and have ordered some wefts from Giovanna Imperia Designs. I’m currently working on designing the leaves, and will work on the butterflies next. I expect progress on that to be slow as working with Photoshop on a laptop screen is cramped and difficult – but, well, we’ll see. More photos once I get further along in my sketches!

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More design sketches

The last week got eaten up by preparations for my Black Friday sale, but now that that’s almost done, I’m back to work on “Seasons of Creativity”!

I’ve been experimenting with some sketches in Photoshop. I tried some sketches with the leaf motif, starting with this one.

“Seasons of Creativity,” sketch #1

There were a couple concepts behind this sketch. The bottom left represented the dying leaves of autumn, followed by the blue of winter, and then the resurgence of creativity in the spring, leading to a burst of free ideas (represented by the flying leaves and the explosion of non-leafy colors). I was thinking I could also make the leaves three-dimensional, weaving them with a silk/stainless steel weft (or some other stiff weft) in a double weave structure, stitched in a single layer down the center of the leaf stem, and then cutting them free from the backing layer in strategic areas. That would be fun!

I didn’t like the sketch, though. The flying leaves felt too constrained, the brown and blue felt uninteresting, and I didn’t like the progression from bottom left to top right, and…well, lots of “ands”.

I went back to the previous sketch, which I liked a lot better:

Why did I like it better?

I thought about it and decided that I liked the sense of freedom in the leaves in this sketch. In the other sketch, I had eliminated all the overlapping leaves, and shaped the flow of the leaves fairly tightly, sending them upward (which is against the natural downward flow of a falling leaf). The result felt stilted and stiff.

The leaves in this sketch, on the other hand, were floating down freely, playfully, and felt much more open.

But there was no tension in the image, no sense of progress. It needed something to give it tension. What?

Now, my friend Osnat had suggested using butterflies instead of leaves for the original sketch, because butterflies and creativity, right?

I had felt that was too cliched to use.

But…what about leaves falling, dying, transforming into butterflies, and flying off?

"Seasons of Creativity" design sketch for my next piece

I like this idea!

It’s still just a concept sketch, but I think this one has a good bit of meat to it. There are two concepts layered in here. The first is the idea of the natural cycle of birth/death, applied to creativity and creative projects. The completion of a project on the left, followed by a fallow resting phase (possibly with a bit of moping and depression, which usually happens to me for a few weeks between major projects), followed by flights of fancy as a new project takes form.

The second concept is the evolution of ideas. On the left, fairly staid, stable ideas – leaves in autumn, the natural world, things that have been going on for millions of years. Those ideas fall into the mind, compost, cocoon, and emerge as free, fanciful, colorful ideas that flutter off and create new things. (Okay, butterflies are still kind of cliched, but work with me here, OK? 🙂 )

Technically, this could be created with two or three painted wefts. I’m tempted to use a thicker thread that is wrapped with metallic glitter, or to use a carryalong metallic thread, to make the butterflies glimmer.

There is still quite a bit of work to do to arrive at a final sketch, let along a workable, weavable file. Also, I’ll have to drag the knitting machine out of the closet and knit some knitted-blank samples for dyeing…lots to do!

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“Seasons of Creativity”

I’ve been dreaming up new ideas over the past few days. None of them seemed particularly worth exploring, until I got to this one:

falling leaves

This is just an initial sketch, but I like the basic thesis. The theme is the changing seasons, represented by light blue for winter, light green for spring, darker green for the mature leaves of summer, and orange/brown for autumn. The variety of colors comes from three different painted/color gradated wefts; each leaf is woven with one of the three painted wefts and so there are three different color gradations in the piece.

(Why painted wefts and not painted warps? Because the warp is already on the loom, and it’s black. Not much room for messing around there.)

It’s a little hard to visualize the subtle differences in color gradations, so I did an illustrative mockup in rainbow colors to show an exaggerated version of the color gradations:

Here the color gradation is exactly the same but each set of leaves is at a different place in the gradation, so the differing colors are much more obvious.

This sketch is just a starting-point. From here I’m playing with a bunch of ideas/questions. The biggest one is, “What is the essence of this design, the central theme that I want to build this piece around?” Because the answer to that question determines how I answer most of the other questions I have, many of which are basically technical, either in design or execution.

(Examples of the technical questions are, “Can I work texture into this?” and “Do I want to use detail in it, such as shading the leaves realistically using 8-end satins, or should I keep the leaves abstract?”)

I think, tentatively, that the answer to the theme question is that the design has a sense of playfulness, freedom, and change – I actually like the rainbow version better than the autumn colors version, as it feels less constrained.

Revisiting the Convergence theme statement,

Exploration of outside influences, changes in environment, harmony with nature, and the rhythm of natural cycles inspire the work for this mixed media fiber arts exhibit.

I wonder if the theme for this piece might be something like “Seasons of Creativity” and the analogy might be between the cycle of a creative project and the cycle of the natural seasons? I find that when I take on a major project, there is a natural beginning, spring growth, maturity, ripening/harvest, and then a resting phase before the next project starts again. So perhaps there is a theme to be found there. It may not be the theme for this project and these falling leaves, but it seems like a meaty theme, and a good starting-place for new work.

If so, the leaves might be a piece unto themselves, and also the first of four pieces, “Spring,” full of creative freedom and possibility.

Food for thought!

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Some thoughts for new work

I’m starting to think about my next piece. Show season is coming up, and I need some work to submit for Convergence (deadline February 5, 2020) and Complexity (deadline March 15, 2020). Because those shows run concurrently, they need to be two separate pieces.

I also need to produce a new piece for the Complex Weavers Designing Fabrics Study Group, whose theme this year is “Texture”. My article isn’t due until October, but given how busy my schedule has been, better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later.

I looked at the prospectuses for the exhibit for constraints, which can be a source of inspiration. Complexity doesn’t have any constraints except for size, but the Symphony of the Mountains Mixed Media Exhibit had some interesting guidelines around themes:

Exploration of outside influences, changes in environment, harmony with nature, and the rhythm of natural cycles inspire the work for this mixed media fiber arts exhibit.

In addition, looking at the Designing Fabrics Study Group page on the Texture topic yielded (among other things) this intriguing snippet:

What then to do about color?

….Create a multi-dimensional experience: visuals showing one design, tactile another.

This raises an intriguing possibility: woven shibori to create crinkly texture (like a topographic map of the mountains?), combined with two painted wefts that gradually change colors along the length of the piece to give the impression of changing seasons. Combined with some sort of imagery, perhaps, though I don’t know what yet. Or I might just make it abstract – woven shibori provides enough patterning that adding more patterning on top of that might tip the whole thing into chaos.

Conceptually, not entirely unlike the work of Itchiku Kubota (below), except very, very different, and not nearly as complex or masterful. This is a simple, early exploration, not a masterwork.

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Paying your (creative) self first

It’s been a long dry spell for my creative projects. Years, in fact. I’ve been so busy working on my teaching business that I simply haven’t had the time or energy to do anything else.

However, I’ve finally finished creating a class that I think I can be proud of, and I’ve reached the point where I have a little breathing room. But, I still felt like I had no ideas, no inspiration for creative work.

After thinking about this for a little while, I realized it was because I was getting up every morning, spending four hours working on business stuff, and then, in my “spare time,” trying to do creative work. But it doesn’t work that way. At least, not for me.

My prime creative hours are in the morning, as soon as I get up. By spending four hours working on business stuff, I was essentially spending everything on the business and then trying to give the remaining crumbs to my creative work.

This is like the common fallacy that people commit while trying to save for retirement: save whatever money’s left over at the end of the month. Every financial planner ever born will tell you not to do that, because there will never be anything left over. Instead, if you want to save, pay yourself first. Put your money into savings at the beginning of the month, and make your finances work with whatever’s left over after that. You’ll find a way.

So that’s what I’m going to start doing: Pay my creative self first. I’m going to spend two hours every morning doing creative work before starting in on business work for the day. Whatever business work needs to get done will have to fit in around that.

Welcome back, creative self. It’s been a long time.