*Photo taken on Saturday at a BBQ in between rain showers, edited with the new “A Beautiful Mess app”*

I’ve had a few things on my mind recently and it has come around because I’ve started doing all of these new crafty and arty things and generally, being more creative and loving it. There is a bit of a long back story to this one, stretching 7 years so make sure you’re sitting comfortably and you have a big cup of tea. This has been a very hard but honest post to write.

You may or may not know that I studied an art and design foundation course when I was 18-19. I had just left school and it was a big step to being at a university, studying an arty subject, all day everyday, surrounded by other art students who were brilliant at what they do, some were older than me, some were about the same age but I mostly thought that they were all better than me at art. I took things so seriously when I was that age and found it so hard to do anything else but what I thought was Graphic Design at the time. I’d find it hard to draw anything, not because I couldn’t physically hold a pencil but because I knew it wouldn’t be good enough, what came out of my hand and the pencil wasn’t what was in my head. It was part perfectionism and partly because I wasn’t brave enough to just try something, anything!

Throughout the foundation year I tried a bit of everything, a few weeks of fine art, then 3D, photography, graphics and fashion. It was quite a whirlwind! It was all quite rushed at the beginning and all along I didn’t really “get it”. I struggled big time. My favourite part was 3D, the brief was to create a pop up card. I created a pop up of Roy Litchenstein’s “Whaam!” I struggled with it at the start but loved the result. I loved the craft side of it, and loved that once I got the hang of the pop up mechanism, it was quite simple to do and was quite effective and looked great.

I knew at the end of these different sections that I didn’t want to specialise in 3D, the pop-up card that I loved so much was mostly 2D, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to to, it wasn’t “me.” So I decided to specialise in Graphic Design and Illustration, this is what inspired me to do an Art and Design Foundation in the first instance, I’d already made my decision before and I stuck to it.

However, I struggled throughout the rest of the year. I struggled for ideas, I struggled to get the few ideas I had out on paper. I had never used adobe photoshop before, I was vaguely familiar with adobe illustrator but no where near as familiar as the rest of the class seemed to be with photoshop and other software. There were a lot of outgoing and talented people in my class and they all seemed to be racing ahead of me with ideas, while I felt very shy, insecure and I was struggling. I worked so hard, I would work away at whatever project I was doing for hours, I’d get home late and carry on working. I know now that I was working hard but just in the wrong direction.

Fast forward to the end of that foundation year and I got the lowest mark possible, my tutor had said that I almost got the mark above but not quite, which eased the blow a little. I’d worked so hard, I was almost expecting to do a little better but deep down I knew that I had been going in the wrong direction for a while.

After a whirlwind foundation year and not quite getting the grade that I needed to get into the University that I wanted. It hit my confidence quite bad. Confidence has never been a strong point of mine. I had grown a lot during that foundation year but not quite enough.

My foundation tutor spoke to the university that I wanted to go to because it is very rare that a student would have to get anything higher than a pass on a foundation course to get onto a degree course. The tutors at Newport said that it was no problem at all and so I was relieved that I could still go to my chosen uni regardless of my mark.

So I went to university, I moved 140 miles away from home so that I didn’t have any distractions. I could be focused on university work and also on university life.

After struggling through my foundation year, I was convinced that I could do better. I wanted to show them! Not in a horrible spiteful way but I’d felt so horrible after foundation that I needed to make a difference. If I was going to University to do the same subject, I didn’t want to mope around thinking I wasn’t good enough and that I would fail because if I thought like that then it sure would happen!

I feel like I picked myself up through those three years at uni, I was driven and focused to be better, better than myself more than anything. In the first term of uni it was commented by one of my lecturers that I had tried to be too ambitious. He said this almost in a negative way, I certainly didn’t see it as a negative thing. I must have been doing something right!

I still had a niggling thought in the back of my mind that I wasn’t good enough. I guess it’s natural to think that one can do better but the low mark from my foundation year was in the back of my mind. It was making me think that maybe I’m doing all of the work correctly for the marks but the work isn’t any good and my ideas aren’t creative enough. I still struggled for ideas, I found it hard to draw out those few ideas but it was a big improvement on my work from foundation. I was also quite a perfectionist still, a lot of my work was very safe. I pushed myself but not so much. After some very hard work and focus, I managed to get a first class degree, I must have done something right, but that’s not the point of this post.

Fast forward again to now and I’ve been working as a Graphic Designer for 2 and a half years. I’ve been working through being a perfectionist and have been doing a lot of things to actively be more creative, you don’t have to search too far to find exactly what I’ve been doing on this blog. This blog being one of the things that has helped me in my quest to be more creative. I’m so much happier now that I’ve almost got around my fear of getting things wrong and just getting things done, predominantly arty things. It’s a great feeling. Creativity really is like a muscle where the more you exercise it, the better it is. I’m not saying that I’m the most creative person in the world now but I’m getting loads better.

So, it crossed my mind, I wonder what it would be like if I was to do the art and design foundation course again as I am now. It got me thinking. I don’t regret doing an art and design foundation and starting my art education when I did at all because I may not be where I am now. It’s not even a case of regretting anything, it just makes me think about if I’d done things differently. I do wonder if I was really ready for being an art student when I knew nothing about art or about my abilities.

But then, would I ever have known anything that I know now if I hadn’t taken that step? I certainly wouldn’t have the awesome friends that I met on the foundation course and at Newport. I may not have even gone to Newport! I may not have started this little blog. I certainly couldn’t have learned all of what I know now on my own.

What if my work was absolutely brilliant in my foundation course and I found it really easy to pass with a distinction? I may have gone on to university and just coasted along, not really learning anything, not driven to do anything or prove anything. I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed university half as much as I did. What if I’d travelled before the foundation course and knew a bit more about the world an about myself? (I’m really not cut out for travelling, that would have been a terrible plan!)

They say that University teaches you how to learn and I suppose that is exactly what it did. I didn’t know anything when I left uni compared to now!

I’m so glad in a way that things happened how they did, because what matters is now. It’s good to think about the past and learn from it but I don’t like to have regrets, I certainly don’t regret going to university when I did or doing a foundation. What matters is now, and now I have a degree in something I love doing, now I can sit with a pencil and a sketchbook and draw anything that I want to, not because I’m a brilliant illustrator (not at all!) but because if it goes wrong, there’s plenty more paper (and trust me I have enough way too many sketchbooks!) I have so many ideas for my little shop that I seriously need to take about a month off work to be able to implement them, I don’t think that would even be enough! Now, I’m writing on this blog a lot more regularly than last year, which is good, and I LOVE that I have this blog! Even if only a handful of people read it and just one person feels inspired, I feel I’ve done my job. And now, I’m SO glad that I don’t take things so seriously! I’ve definitely gained some perspective over the last few years, life is way too short to be worrying about whether you’re good enough.

I wonder if all of this is down to my education, my change is perspective, a change in my frame of mind, would things have happened like this anyway? Or is it just that I’ve ‘grown up’? I don’t know. But all I know is that I’m so happy that things have worked out the way that they did.

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