that’s a mood (board)
it’s week 4 of the one room challenge™!!! we are halfway to a finished dining room!!!
the what?
the orc is a twice-a-year virtual hullabaloo in which designers of all experience levels get together to cheer one another on in our quests to finish one room in eight weeks.
it’s not a competition - just a way to build community among diyers and professional designers alike. the challenge is all about peeling back the curtain and supporting each other!
you can find other participants’ entries on the one room challenge™ website. it’s a myriad of inspiration!
a visual brain dump
With clients’ designs I follow a process, from mood board, to layout, to item list, to - voila! - finished room. with my own home... ah, heh, heh. not so much.
since I’ve been working on my own space the whole time I’ve been living in it, i take a more, um, fluid approach. that is to say, I have notes EVERYwhere, spanning streams of consciousness from decades past. Trello, evernote, google keep, this notebook, that notebook, my planner, my sketchbook, taped to my studio wall, used as a bookmark - you get the picture.
I decided to take all those disparate thoughts and create myself a mood board for this room, just like I would for a design client.
making a mood board is one of my favorite stages of the design process. it is like journaling, but with pictures. like a brain dump of everything i am thinking might influence the room design, then i cut it down to the core elements. (being a maximalist, i still end up with a lot of stuff.)
I am one of those people who still get magazines and newspapers delivered to my home. tell me it’s bad for the environment and I’ll ask you how you’re going to recycle your iPad, but hey, it’s not a competition and I have an ipad too so I guess we’re even.
gettin’ rippy with it
i’ll see myself out...
many people love to use pinterest for moodboards, but me, I like to go IRL for inspiration.
i definitely use pinterest - it’s great for keeping track of lots of visual information - but I enlist its help at a later stage of the design process (namely, making item lists for my clients).
when I’m in the brainstorming stage, i can easily get overwhelmed by browsing the internet (there are just so many THINGS out here!!!). I find that doing a mood board by hand helps me maintain a better state of flow.
flow, you say?
flow is when you are doing something (reading, playing music, writing, running, painting, idk) and you lose track of time. you are absorbed in your work with no care as to the sun’s position in the sky or your bodily needs (ok maybe not the latter). it’s that feeling of rhythm and oneness with the thing you’re doing.
and for me, finding flow is easiest when I’m working on things with my hands, creating something tangible, not digital.
so, off I went to my library of magazines and fabric swatches and paint samples and came away with...
a huge mess!
and also my mood board. let me take you on a tour ~
colors: forest green, deep sea blue, fiery orange, bright white
textures: rattan, vintage metal hardware, porcelain, reclaimed wood, shiny brass, velvet
moods: vintage, jungle
what’s next
now that the ideas are down on paper properly, it’s time to find their IRL proximations! more on that next week!
