I Missed A Shot

Brenda and I work far in advance of project completion. It may take a couple of years for a project to move from idea to completion, sometimes it’s a matter of days…but most of the time a new idea takes 9-12 months to work through.

It’s easy to understand why when you realize that our work is primarily inspired by nature…natural things or colors or seasons and so forth. So if one gets an idea that requires the use of a leaf for example…and you think of same in say, January…you wait. Either for spring or the fall, depending on the state of the leaf in question…and then you work on the idea which could be a month or more (easily).

I frequently get ideas when we’re on road trips. I mean, what is one supposed to think about while driving down the road...driving? So I sort of keep a rolling log of ideas to consider when I’m back in the studio. I might find a rock that is just too cool to leave on the ground and that rock might become the muse for an idea later…now to find that thing…or, as in the case of one of our two new projects in process, I need to find material to build parts of the project. So at our cabin in Montana I searched for some good “stuff” to work with back in the studio.

Color combinations are a big thing on my radar at the moment. It would seem that Mother Nature has a pretty good eye when assembling the vistas (and not so vistas) that we all enjoy. So my camera is in-hand on walks lately. I’m thankful that the digital process came into being…once upon a time, sounds like eons…more like a couple decades ago, it was film and that expense of developing quick little memo/pictures was, how do you say it… “special.” I snap pictures in quantity…from the phone…from my Canon…along with video from those two as well as my GoPro.

I’m finding that by keeping the digital tools with me I tend to keep my antennae up and my brain engaged in a different sort of way…although I have to admit that I saw a grizzly bear the other day and didn’t snap the picture…the camera was in my lap and I just didn’t think about it...awesome!

The occasional "oops" does happen.