I don’t know if it is because of my architectural background or not, but I love geometric shapes. I know that they say that to be an artist you have to know and understand shapes because all drawings are nothing more than a combination of shapes to create a figure or anything else. I realize that, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking just drawing a bunch of random shapes on a piece of paper without giving it any thought and seeing where they fall and what interesting design they make. Traffic Jam is nothing more than one of those doodling play times for me.
I first started out with the triangles overlapping each other. Then I added series of circles. At that point I wasn’t really too impressed with it so I added the checkerboard winding strip. Perhaps that is a rule of thumb for me, “if something isn’t working throw in some checkerboard and it will make it all better”. Once I had the design drawn it was okay but I still wasn’t sold on it.
Most of the time when I get to this point if I don’t really like the design it just goes into the trash, but this time I kept going with it. I decided to add some color. When I finished, (and much to my surprise) it wasn’t so bad after all. It definitely wasn’t on my top 10 list but it was worth keeping.
I actually created this design about a year ago and not knowing what I was going to do with I just added it to pile of “maybe for some other day” drawings. Then one day when I was trying to figure out a new product design I started going through some of my older drawings to see if there wasn’t something that I could pull from and maybe rework. That is when I ran across this old friend and thought it might work on a couple of products.
In this case I didn’t rework any part of the design, I just started creating products with it. Much to my surprise the products looked pretty good. The more products I made the better I liked the design.
Why the name Traffic Jam? I named the design Traffic Jam because to me the checkerboard strip looks like a freeway and the circles look like cars all moving in unison with each other. The triangles are the buildings along the freeway.
This just goes to show that as an artist, you might not like the art you create at the time you create it, but that is no reason to throw it away because there will come a day when it is just the piece you are looking for.
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