If you have been to my gallery lately, you probably know that I have done a huge overhaul on the look and feel of the storefront. I changed the banner at the top to a more generic look and edited the text and background color to match. I also spent several hours yesterday just trying to organize my products into product lines by image. (For example all of my products featuring the image "Winged Texture" now has it's own little place in my store instead of trying to categorize them by type of image like I had tried to do before.) In the midst of all that work I also managed to publish a ton of new products- so many that I currently have 322 products, with about 100 more "in progress". With all of the change, I decided to do something I have never done before- publish a product with an image that was NOT a fractal art piece. It was very simple, just a plain brown background with some brightly colored polka dots. I didn't expect it to get any extraordinary attention, but it fits my personal style, so I thought, why not publish it and see what happens. Well, guess what?! This piece I had almost no faith in has won me my first award on Zazzle- "Today's Best, May 4th". How crazy is that?! Ha! (Here's a link if you want to check it out.)
I guess the lesson here is that you never really know what people will think until you take a chance. Just because you didn't spend 5 years creating it does not mean that it is a bad design or that it is in any way inferior to your other pieces. I'm hoping to take a few more chances in the future and see how they pay off. This result encouraged me to publish my first t-shirt. You can see it here.
I hope that each of you reading this blog will allow my experience to encourage you to challenge your approach not only to your creative pursuits, but life in general. As creatures of comfort, we often paint ourselves into a corner just by always doing what we've always done and thereby always getting what we have always gotten. But I don't think we were designed to act this way. I think our hesitancy towards change is a direct result of doubting our instincts. My instinct told me that the design, though simple, was a good one. I took a chance and it paid off. The creative spirit and gut instinct often knows better than the rational logic, but too often as people we think so much about something that we miss out on great opportunities. I don't expect that this award will change your life forever, but I do hope that the story it represents will provoke you to live your life with a little more courage to do what you know is right, taking a chance on your instincts every now and again. You might not always be right, but living your life choosing to take opportunities as they arise instead of watching them pass you by will give you a renewed sense of adventure and curiosity about life that we often lose with age.
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