Okay first and foremost, I designed and created a chess set. I deserve a LONG PAUSE AND APPLAUSE…
Knowing I brought something to fruition from the dominion of my mind leaves me in awe. I’m beyond proud of myself for this accomplishment. IT TOOK THREE YEARS! The feeling may not always show outwardly but my inner child is frolicking in deep admiration.
So let me talk ad nauseam about this chess set. The delusional beginnings, the what seemed like endless middles, and the momentous end.
The Beginning….
The beginning starts with the desire to give a custom thoughtful birthday gift to a lover.
Playing chess was a hobby of theirs and I knew a custom chess set was a wanted gift. I searched relentlessly for a fellow artist that could execute a custom chess set but quickly became discouraged when I wasn’t seeing a representation of what I wanted accomplished. So I pivoted and decided I would stretch my skills and design a custom chess set. I love to create art for people and I find it to be an act of service to use my God given gifts to spread joy in this way. However, I quickly discovered the pressure of creating something to express my love in a romantic way became almost limiting and it felt like self-abandonment if I didn’t make something so cool for myself first. Also, we ended our relationship and that definitely served as a catalyst to take pause. So as I normally do, I put the idea away for about a year as a future project and I was able to circle back around to it when I actually decided to commit seriously.
As I was brainstorming themes for this functional chess set, I had to embark on a study of all the artwork I had produced up until that point of finalizing the theme. I’ve done this method of connecting non-painted/drawn artwork to my painted/drawn collections. An example would be I’ve spent many years making clothes which I consider an art practice and over the course of time, fashion made its way into my digital and painted artworks. I even made a clay sculpture of jeans that looks so real that you would be tasked to tell the difference. So naturally, I thought I was done with my flower pieces but the idea decided to make a comeback—A feverish comeback. And I knew this chess set was going to be flower inspired. Originally, I thought about turning the pieces I had already painted into physical representations but it seemed a little repetitive. So I scoured high and low across the reaches of the internet using everything from google to Pinterest to flower blogs to flowers I came across in hikes and determined the flowers below would be my starting inspirations.
King Protea, Cranberry Hibiscus, Flamingo Flower
Crocosmia, Ashanti Blood, Amaryllis
In choosing all of these flowers as my muses, I wanted to make sure each piece felt spiritually and significantly relevant to the whole. While I’m very flexible in the journey, I was very adamant that the end product needed to be transparent in both aesthetic and emotion. So I created my first sketches with these flowers in mind and thus began the work.
…The ENDLESS Middle…
I’m someone who loves to work with my hands and I have a natural affinity to clay being that it has been a useful medium for other works. So this was my starting point when trying to figure out how to begin making the chess pieces. In all honesty, the first drafts just looked like caricatures of what I wanted to achieve and no matter how hard I tried to execute the level of detail needed, it wasn’t being captured.
I identified a skill issue. As I do with many projects, once an obstacle has made itself evident or I become a little discouraged, I tabled executing this project in clay and went back to the ideation process.
Once I departed from clay as the medium, I started to explore what it would look like to have this piece look like glass. As much as I would love to have pursued making this chess set out of glass, a skill issue once again would have been revealed so I went with the next best thing… resin. To execute resin pieces was still a challenge and this was an experiment as much as it was a journey. But I went to YouTube and TikTok university and tried to figure out to best way to maneuver this medium. I think I can safely say it worked out in the end but the length of the process was extremely underestimated. I walked into the thought of making resin chess pieces with the expectation that the process would be linear. That I would go from point A to point B to point C. In actuality, it was more like going from point A to point A2 to point A3 and so on and so forth. This was continuous as I encountered every new step in crafting these resin pieces. To start, I had to take into account making the draft pieces. Initially, I entertained utilizing a 3D pen to start. Once again, I comically underestimated the level of skill needed to create the intricate detail. However, the length of time to understand that was much shorter than when using clay. So I pivoted sharply to 3D printing. Which brought me to the next challenge of teaching myself 3D modeling programs.
1st 3D pen draft (left), 1st 3D printing draft (right)
Long story short, I started with Blender, but I didn’t entirely like the interface so I switched to NomadSculpt. Big props to Dave Reed on Youtube because without his tutorials, NomadSculpt might have also been more challenging. Once I got acquainted with the program, it felt like a middle ground between pencil drawing and molding clay. By then, I was in love.
Naturally, I also had to tweak designs multiple times as I learned the concept of ensuring the structure was both strong enough for the printing phase and the arduous steps to proceed.
3D Printing 2nd Draft (left), 3D Printing 3rd draft (right)
Once settled on a final design, the most tedious segment begins with developing the pieces to make silicone molds. Silicone picks up every interstice. And prior to even creating the mold, it’s in the best interest to prime the printed piece to help fill the crevices. Once the silicone mold is created, I then had to account for how slowly I needed to pour the resin into the molds so every nook and cranny was filled and reduce the possibility of bubbles forming in the resin pieces. That lead to unearthing the resin from the molds only to have to do spot corrections with UV resin to fill holes. Then proceeding to multiple sanding stages using different varieties of sanding paper to get the desired smoothness and then having to buff and polish ALL 32 pieces. The entirety of this operation was laborious.
Not to mention, I made the custom chessboard by building household objects such as a wood plank, floor tile, and a bundt cake pan which had to go through the same tedious process as the chess pieces. The building process felt endless and in total I spent about nine months executing this development. Early mornings and late nights spent before and after my day job to see this through to fruition and selfishly to finish this project so I could get back to my true lover, painting.
…The End
Once all the dreary steps of sanding, polishing, and floodcoating have been done, I took the biggest step back to look at my work.
It’s going to sound so cliche but what started as a gift for a lover ended up being a gift to myself in so many ways. I learned a new skill is always within reach through both my own resourcefulness and the teachings of countless creators on Youtube/TikTok university. I learned to have the discipline to commit to a project longer than a few months to see it through to completion. I learned that I am incredibly talented and creative.
Like I knew that before but I reached new heights this time around.
I put into practice the theory of learning when to rest and when to pivot. I’ve held the ethic that I could recognize it . Learning when to pivot and/or adapt have been my mantra for the better part of the last five years. How rewarding it is to know that I am living by the values I claim in real time. I designed a beautiful functional art piece that now sits in my home as a love letter to myself and everything from the flower inspirations to the shape and color of the finished piece was chosen with the utmost intention.
Like how do I even really end this diary entry when I feel like I’ve said so little and so much at the same time. I think I can sum the experience up like this.
Building an entire chess set over a period of three years taught me:
to change without explaining every stage of the change. I think the only person who needs to understand the change is myself. And this has also manifested in my artistry by not feeling like I need to visibly show everyone every step in my process. I am an ARTIST not a content creator. A calm surface truly can hold intense work.
Don’t be afraid of a dramatic transformation. This chess set might have indirectly been a representative of the intense transitions in my personal life that I had to navigate. I can say in retrospect that I did fear being ordinary going through this transition. Being in the limbo of knowing that you are changing but not knowing who you are changing into is a scary place to be. But I just had to sit it in. And the lesson I took was you can’t be loved only for your polish surface. The lesson was freeing because I feel like I’m even more myself now than I’ve been in years. I had to find my way back home to myself.
Lastly, remaining composed while difficult change takes shape is important but you know what else is just as important… spazzing when you need to release. Just make sure the crash out is not malicious but rather cathartic. Transmute the difficult times and refine them to place yourself in a higher position than when you started.
After a period of radical rest—because I learned most of all that resting is a radical act and denying rest hinders growth— I emerge renewed, refined, and polished just like this chess set and ready to take on my next project that will contribute to the next step of growth in my artistry.
