I love when artists share the background of the finished product I see because it helps me to appreciate the piece even more. I am able to understand the story behind it all, and feel like I am more connected to the song or design or whatever else is being presented to me. Since I think it's so cool to get inside a creative's head, I thought it would be cool to give you all some background to some of my favorite designs... so here you go!
The first design, isn't really a design but a look. This is the first thing I made when I was coming up with this website and how I wanted everything to be styled. I knew that I wanted to continue to use neutral colors, so that part was kind of easy. I got the name "Things by Kae," from the help of one of my mentors Allie Schaal. The font I used for "Kae" came about because I saw it on Type Kit (a font website by Adobe). The hard part was finding a secondary font to match this font, but after trying out a bunch of different ones, I eventually I found one.
I added the two colored boxes next just to add something more to look at, and incorporate the colors more. By this point, the design looked boring so I decided to add a few phrases to bring it all together. The phrase "shine among them like stars" came from a scripture that I really liked and "idk man, just create something" was legit just gonna be a space filler because I didn't know what to do. But then I realized that I actually liked it. The stars were added because they are my favorite shape and they allowed me to showcase my branding colors even more. And lastly, the extra doodles were because I just like the "doodle" look. I make a lot of design decisions "just because I feel like it."
I had this idea of being steadfast and knew that I wanted to make a design with that word incorporated somewhere in it. I didn’t have an image to go with it or what the vibe of the design would be. So I did what I do with most of my unfinished ideas, I wrote down the scraps of my thoughts and left them there until I figured out what I wanted to do. Later on, I had the idea of maybe using an image that had something to do with walking or standing or just shoes/legs in general.
I ended up taking some pictures with my friends for a completely different project, and as I was editing them, I saw an image where our feet were going in different directions and I kind of liked the way it looked. So I cropped the photo to show just our shoes. Immediately, I thought of using the whole “steadfast” idea. As with most of my designs, there is usually some type of biblical or faith based background and this idea was no different. I began to look up a bunch of different scriptures that dealt with being steady or consistent and I took certain lines out of them and strung them all together. Then came the fun part which is choosing the color of the text. I used a color from a pallet I had saved a while ago. As for the placement of the text and how simple or complex I want the design is a little bit harder to choose. I tested out two different looks for this design until I came up with the final product. (The final is the larger image, and the two drafts are the smaller ones).
This piece is definitely one of my favorites. I am constantly finding different inspiration from Pinterest, and a style that I had been wanting to try was like that digitized doodle type of look. However, I still didn’t have a project to use it for.
Fast forward, I’m at school chillin before my next class when I get overwhelmed by feelings of being overlooked and a desire to be validated by outside sources. Not fun. Usually when my mind gets clouded like this, I first reaffirm what I know to be true and I like to write. I start with my feelings and then transition to basically giving myself a pep talk (side note: I think it’s very important to be able to encourage your own self instead of waiting for other people or things to let you know everything is going to be alright). After restoring my happiness, I decided that I wanted to turn this piece into a design.
I originally had only used the picture of my face, shoe, and hand to trace the drawing that I wanted to put on the design, but once I finished, I had grown fond of how the doodles looked over the pictures. So I kept them. Then I just spaced everything out and added a few lines to tie the whole thing together. And that’s about it.
The picture I used came from the inspiration of Pinterest once again. The design came from me needing to make a design for this post. So I just took a phrase from this post, and yeah.
If you haven’t noticed by now, a big trend in how I design things is just putting random things together and moving it around or deleting stuff until I find an arrangement that looks good to me. A lot of what I do starts out as a mistake, but hey, if it works, it works.
Thanks for reading!
Kae
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