adapt, dye, repeat!! CREATING HAPPY ACCIDENTS FROM CHAOS.

Many years ago, a much loved and infinitely generous art teacher said, if you make a mess, repeat it in the piece so that it look as if you meant it to be like that! If a color jars, repeat it in another part of the painting, if the squares you painted are ugly, find a place for more! I sometimes have to remind myself of this concept, so when the burr I was using to make dots on the outside of a bowl skidded along the wood and made a line, I made a series of lines hoping to make it look intentional! #fixes #creative fixes

Similarly and because I lack a basic knowledge of wood, I sometimes do really silly stuff, like airbrushing without first sealing the wood. I ended up with this mess, sigh!

As I rather liked this little Beech wood bowl and was loathe to abandon it, I tried light, hand sanding of the offensive bits, but that didn't do much to improve things, so I drew in some "artfully positioned" guinea fowl feathers with an archival ink pen and hopefully made it look as if that was the design I had intended all along! I thought it was nice until my husband asked why I had drawn hedgehogs on my bowl?!? I guess Guinea fowl are not that common in the US:) #feathers #guineafowl #archivalink #beechwood #hand-turned #bowl

I guess that this is similar to the "Happy Accident" theory, which basically says that when things don't go according to plan, they can end up with something better than you originally intended if you can rethink, adjust and adapt! Create Happy Accidents from Chaos is the name of the game!

#adjust #adapt #happyaccident

Both of these concepts take me down the road of not letting mistakes get in the way of having fun. How much easier is it so say, hmmm, that's not what I intended, but what can I do with it now? I believe these are currently called "Design Opportunities", that works for me. But it does require, or at least it required me, to do a major attitude adjustment. Coming from a serious scientific background where everything had to be absolutely spot-on perfect all the time, I had to learn to "lighten up" and not take myself or the work I was doing, too seriously. Now I am starting to have real fun:) #designopportunities #lightenup

It seems to me that the secret to creating great, interesting and innovate design may simply be the ability to adapt, go with the flow, capitalize on chaos, making lemonade from lemons and all the other cliches that are absolutely relevant. #lemonsandlemonade

See you at the lathe!

#woodturning #design #happyaccident #designopportunities #adapt