Sometimes you come across a thing, you know, and it’s just… right there. You absolutely can’t miss it, and it defines the whole situation, whether you like it or not. That’s been my experience a few times, especially when I get deep into a project.
I was tinkering with this custom build, a kind of sculptural piece I was making for fun. Just a hobby, something to keep my hands busy. I had this vision for it, sketched it out, started gathering materials. Most of it was coming along okay, bits and pieces fitting together.
But then there was this one element. Man, it was just… way too much. You know? It just dominated the whole look of the thing. Stood out like a sore thumb. Anyone I showed my early sketches to, their eyes went straight to it, and not in a good way. It was totally throwing off the whole balance I was aiming for. That was the ‘big nipplee’ of my project, if you catch my meaning – the one obvious bit that was causing all the trouble and I knew I had to tackle.
So, I got down to it. My ‘practice’ for this was basically just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. First, I tried to make it smaller, kinda shrink it down, hoping it would blend in. Nope, still looked off, like an afterthought. Then I figured, okay, maybe I can hide it a bit, painted it some dull color, tried to make it recede. Still, that thing was somehow the loudest part in the room. I was really close to just giving up on the whole project, seriously. My workshop was a graveyard of crumpled sketches and discarded parts. I must’ve spent weeks just messing with that one stubborn element, trying to figure out how to make it work, or if I should just chop it off entirely.
Then, after staring at it for what felt like an eternity, it kinda hit me. What if I stopped fighting it? Instead of trying to make it disappear or diminish it, what if I leaned into it? What if I made it the actual hero of the piece, but like, in a deliberate, balanced way? So I started over with that particular section. Reshaped it quite a bit, then I began adding some complementary elements around it, things that actually supported it and made sense with it, rather than fighting it. And bam! Suddenly, it wasn’t this awkward, out-of-place ‘big nipplee’ anymore. It became the anchor, the thing that pulled the whole design together and gave it character. It was a long haul, felt like I was trying to solve a really tricky puzzle with half the pieces missing, but that’s how you learn, eh? Sometimes the thing that looks like your biggest, most obvious problem is actually trying to tell you something important, and your practice becomes about listening differently.
