Orphan Design Week - Day 4 (more or less): Red Lightning
Sorry I missed yesterday’s post on this; I fell asleep in front of my computer, so weary was I as a result of the grim toil of my day to day existence. My intuition tells me that, as tired as I was, my post - had I made it - would have lacked my characteristic verve and verbosity anyways.
This design (which I’m putting below the cut for the sake of those who are more sensitive to the appearance of lady parts than others) is a bit of an unusual one for me.
Last year, I put out an ad on Craigslist, looking for models (and got a few decent sets out of the experience), and a whole lot of bullshit and flakes. This is one of the latter. This young woman responded to my ad and came over to my place to have a look at my sketchbooks. Inside of my sketchbooks, I keep all of my designs, as well as - wherever applicable - photos of the corresponding shoots. There’s a couple in there that I no longer display online, for one reason or another. One of them is an exceptionally early set of mine, back when I was just figuring out what I was doing. There was no set, no backdrop. The model was a friend of mine who was literally just standing around in my cluttered kitchen. It was a good design, if a simple one, but for display purposes, it falls well below my usual standards. It also has a lot more exposed skin, since I was still getting the hang of things back then, and my designs lacked the complexity and thoroughness that the ones I’ve done since then have.
While normally what I do at this point in the process is find an un-used design which the would-be model likes and then get to work on re-designing it for her, this woman for some reason gravitated towards this ancient design of mine like no other, and could not be dissuaded from it. While normally I would have just flatly said “no”, because I have no interest in repetition, there was the fact that I no longer displayed that one, and therefore a re-do of it would not represent a repetition in my overall body of work. What’s more, it was so very different than what I tend to do now that there was some appeal in doing that different style. I told her I would come up with something which was similar to that old one, though more complex and thorough, and asked her - just to be completely sure - if she wanted the same degree of exposed bits as was in the original design. She affirmed that she did.
So! I set to work on designing the new version of the old design on paper, and then, after I was happy with it, re-designing it for her form. It took a while; it was an interesting challenge to adapt old material to new techniques, though not an unpleasant one. Nevertheless, it did take quite a few hours.
Finally, I sent it off to her. And got no reply. Not even a “no”, not even a “let’s try a different approach”, not even a “I’ve changed my mind.” Absolute and inexplicable silence. I tried a number of times, over the course of about two weeks, to get a response out of her, but there was no break in the silence.
This one annoyed me a bit more than most because it was a custom job, from top to bottom, which was crafted specifically as per her request, and she lacked even the courtesy to acknowledge all the work I had put in on her behalf.
But that’s how it goes sometimes.
Most of the time, really.
This design (which I’m putting below the cut for the sake of those who are more sensitive to the appearance of lady parts than others) is a bit of an unusual one for me.
Last year, I put out an ad on Craigslist, looking for models (and got a few decent sets out of the experience), and a whole lot of bullshit and flakes. This is one of the latter. This young woman responded to my ad and came over to my place to have a look at my sketchbooks. Inside of my sketchbooks, I keep all of my designs, as well as - wherever applicable - photos of the corresponding shoots. There’s a couple in there that I no longer display online, for one reason or another. One of them is an exceptionally early set of mine, back when I was just figuring out what I was doing. There was no set, no backdrop. The model was a friend of mine who was literally just standing around in my cluttered kitchen. It was a good design, if a simple one, but for display purposes, it falls well below my usual standards. It also has a lot more exposed skin, since I was still getting the hang of things back then, and my designs lacked the complexity and thoroughness that the ones I’ve done since then have.
While normally what I do at this point in the process is find an un-used design which the would-be model likes and then get to work on re-designing it for her, this woman for some reason gravitated towards this ancient design of mine like no other, and could not be dissuaded from it. While normally I would have just flatly said “no”, because I have no interest in repetition, there was the fact that I no longer displayed that one, and therefore a re-do of it would not represent a repetition in my overall body of work. What’s more, it was so very different than what I tend to do now that there was some appeal in doing that different style. I told her I would come up with something which was similar to that old one, though more complex and thorough, and asked her - just to be completely sure - if she wanted the same degree of exposed bits as was in the original design. She affirmed that she did.
So! I set to work on designing the new version of the old design on paper, and then, after I was happy with it, re-designing it for her form. It took a while; it was an interesting challenge to adapt old material to new techniques, though not an unpleasant one. Nevertheless, it did take quite a few hours.
Finally, I sent it off to her. And got no reply. Not even a “no”, not even a “let’s try a different approach”, not even a “I’ve changed my mind.” Absolute and inexplicable silence. I tried a number of times, over the course of about two weeks, to get a response out of her, but there was no break in the silence.
This one annoyed me a bit more than most because it was a custom job, from top to bottom, which was crafted specifically as per her request, and she lacked even the courtesy to acknowledge all the work I had put in on her behalf.
But that’s how it goes sometimes.
Most of the time, really.