When a WIP Takes Up too Much of Your Time Put it Aside.

My Bear Sachet Design ©Suzanne Urban

The hardest part of being an illustrator who sells on ETSY is finding time to develop new creative products. Some artists seem to do this with dexterous aplomb, not so me, or I just am unaware of all the piles of discarded ideas other artists have in their studios. And some stick to just a singular product. I have a drawer with files of "WIP"projects started and then abandoned when I hit a mental block or technical road block, like the chef ornaments that would sport chef hats made from champagne corks, I couldn't find illustration board to back the printed happy chefs with that would be easy to cut out. Surfing around for a tool that could cut out thick board smoothly made this odyssey more confusing and frustrating. There's the cookie cutters I designed on a 3-D printer from my own illustrations to make Salt Dough cookie ornaments, after over a year of testing recipes and all kinds of flours, I finally realized it wouldn't be a viable product for my ETSY store as one has to bake them for like FIVE hours to get the salt dough to throughly dry out, also cookies fell apart, or the plastic cutter wasn't sharp enough for a nice cut.

Such trials are a blow to my ego as I start out with what I think is a unique and creative idea, bursting with enthusiasm I draw up a design, and then the medium presents too many technical conundrums to the point my brilliant product idea gets abandoned. And I mourn the lost time when I could've created something safer, something more familiar like a print or painting.

Sometimes the issue is more with the illustration. Last week Spoonflower ran a FREE SHIPPING proposal, I've wanted to create some cute character sachets filled with lavendar grown in my own garden. But I hadn't drawn something up that I liked enough to get printed up, until now, but I was unsure how I wanted to execute the drawing–ink? ink and intense pencil? Acrylic and white ink? I didn't come up with a satisfactory solution, so I missed the deadline. Hopefully Spoonflower will come up with the enticing promo again, because by then, I should have the finished designs ready to send off, as I do like the two drawings I came up with, I just need to experiment a little more when I have the time and I need to know when to shelve an idea, rather than plow through and through ad nauseum, until I'm ready to freshly re-visit it.

Please comment below if you can relate to a drawer full of Works In Progress, I'd love to hear from you!