Sometimes flaws are beautiful. A look at the creation of the 2017 NANO POBLANO badge

This year, I’ve not been around a lot. M.I.A. from this blog, because I’ve been busy. Apart from taking care of my children and household I’ve also got a 8 hour day job. When I’ve had some down time, I’ve spent much of it trying to learn new life skills, new creative skills which will in turn also enable me to finish my writing projects.

I’ve been struggling tying to find and work with free design software. I was shocked to learn the price of Adobe’s photo-shop and Illustrator. Do they really charge a monthly fee, just to use a program? And then it all happens on some virtual cloud?

Urg, I’m still frustrated at this new avenue, many software developers have chosen to take. Where are the good ol’ days when you could simply buy and own a bit of software?So I started looking towards free-ware and Open Source solutions.

I stumbled on quite a few, which I still need to get used to.

Then Rara posted a request for a badge design for the one month long, each day, blogging challenge usually attempted by many bloggers in November. We needed a badge for a specific group of bloggers who signed up to attempt the challenge as a Little Pepper.

It was the ideal opportunity for me to focus on something creative which would not be quite as difficult as an entire illustration. Start small when you are learning new things.

I’m glad I took the time. I fell much more confident that I should be able to work on my project.

The new badge is completely different from last year. I took more of an artistic approach to it. Sorry. For this reason it may not be completely what the group was looking for. I hope they like it anyway.

The badge has some design flaws. Flaws I opted to keep.

I was going for a Chilly Pepper, which was a silhouette in the sunset.

When I was shading the sunset, the program inadvertently made a little space. Some or other setting that needed changing. But, I liked the uneven space. It reminded me of a real sunset. When there is a lot of dust in the air, you will sometimes find part of the light coming through stronger in some patches than in other patches of the sky.

There are other flaws, but for similar reasons I kept them. There was also another reason. My theme this year on this blog has been, that nothing in life is perfect. I challenge myself to accept and embrace the perfect imperfections in myself and my creative endeavours.

Sometimes it’s the flaws in life which make life interesting.

What do you think?

It is deffinatlly very different from the badge they had last year.

There you go. The badge of last year is definatly very awesome, and more design like. While mine is more art like.

Considering it is the first time I picked up Inkscape (that’s the Open Source Solution to Adobe Illustrator), to do more than just a practice doodle …

Anyways Darlings, happy NANO POBLANO’ing. Check out the list of other Little Peppers HERE.

About the Author

Sarina often sat on the peaks of the dunes of Southern Africa watching the ocean tide drift in. A daydreamer, often dreaming up stories for lands somewhere over the rainbow. She is a mother, a wife, a blogger and an overall creative spirit. Above all, she is a human being.

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