Working on a design for my label as an instrument constructor (I can't consider myself a luthier yet because that's a master rank in the craft), I spent a lot of time going back to high school and thinking about my worst subjects: Arts, and Drawing.
I gotta tell, I was too stubborn. So, much I didn't give myself the chance of doing some of the stuff that was actually easy. Arts wasn't so hard. I got the gist of it in 8th grade when we got this whole term of working with different media. In my house, there are still some of those works adorning the walls of the backyard. I will show an stucco I had to make with some Egyptian theme. But first, I need to restore it as it was painted with Gouache and gypsium has too many pores to keep the whole drawing intact with all these years.
I wasn't so luck with Drawing. You know the kind of drawing I'm talking about. That one where you use rules and measures and all the thing. It has it's applications. I mean Architects are pretty good at it, so are Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. But back then, I sucked at that. It didn't help my teacher was a grumpy old man. He also wasn't very fond of me, so I couldn't try too much on that.
But when we reached 9th grade and I didn't have to take more art as an obligatory subject, it was bliss. But I still needed to take a final Drawing class. However, this was different. It was Drawing for Commercial Purposes. Basically, a hint of what we know as Graphic Design. What's more, the teacher (he was also old), had been a teacher of my brother and before that (way before), my mother. So we never had problems getting along. And it turns out, I had some pretty good ideas for the things I drew. I wish I had that block, but it was probably gone during the Great Cleansing after both my brother and I finished high school.
What's my point with all this ramble? It's simple. It's easy enough to stay in our comfort zones and complain about those things we can't do well. It's easier than trying because there's this whole culture of failure as something bad. But hey, I did a lot of building during my childhood and it took me plenty of time to get things right. However, was I got that "Uh-huh!" moment, everything made sense and I was able to repeat something as many times as I wanted.
Speaking of trying something new, here it is, my label for some future instruments to be built. It's in Spanish, but you know I'm Venezuelan, so there's no way around it. However, it doesn't say anything too difficult. I'm an instrument constructor (or builder).
Take a look and give me your thoughts:
[Made with Canva]
I spent some hours this morning coming up with this. I took a preexisting design in Canva and changed some things, tried some fonts, distribution and others. The idea of the design and maybe you can tell if you have a guitar or a similar instruments is that you are watching the mouth of the instruments and its strings, and the logo and name inside the body. So it is basically an inception of a label (label within a label).
Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a long term project.
As a final thought, never be afraid to try something new. Someone asked me a moment ago if this making instruments was the thing I wanted to do. It sounded so serious. Like if there was not another choice if I choose this path. I just replied it's what I'm doing now. I get the point. I'm an English Teacher who doesn't like to teach the language. Yeah, that's surprising, but I didn't study with the goal of teaching people how to speak English, but to teach them about other stuff regarding the English language. Perspectives vary and I respect it. But I do not consider one's path cannot change if the need arises. I hope there's no need as I'm having a blast with each little cut and sanding and planning and designing. It's like this is what I was supposed to be doing.