Using Turtles to Tackle My Fears

My graphic design instructors all had a saying that stuck with me. Their advice when you were feeling creatively stuck was to “go towards the fear” as opposed to fleeing from it. Throughout my graphic design education, I often found myself hitting creative roadblocks. The constant push to squeeze creative ideas out of my brain was exciting, challenging, and so rewarding, but with that comes an occasional dry spell when you feel creatively spent and need to replenish your inspiration. Being the scientist at heart that I am, I started looking for patterns to these creative blocks, and low and behold, my design instructors had been right all along—these dry spells always related back to fear. I noticed that I would feel most creatively blocked when I was creating work that was due to be exhibited in a public setting or that would be evaluated in a higher stakes way. The fear would lead to creative blocks, which would lead to more fear, and so on. I knew that to grow as a designer, I needed to find a process for working through these feelings. I needed to define what “going towards the fear” looked like for me.

I found the perfect opportunity to hone these skills when I was asked to create a poster for Paradowski Creative’s exhibition and fundraiser, Apart: Posters from a Social Distance. Knowing that my work would contribute to a fundraiser for such an important cause, the World Health Organization, I felt a desire to product something very special. So here came that old cycle—the pressure, the fear, and the inability to think of ideas. So I decided to try something different. Instead of my usual way of coping with creative blocks, which usually involve relaxation and distraction (think baths, reading, going for walks), I decided to keep pushing myself creatively but in a different vein.

Instead of working directly on the poster, I started drawing simply for fun, and when I allow myself to simply draw, there’s always one subject I return to time and time again: turtles. I can’t tell you why, but for some reason ever since I was a child, I have loved drawing turtles. So that’s what I did. And while drawing the turtles, I started to think about their different parts, particularly their shells and how fascinating it is that they carry their homes with them and can escape into their homes for protection at any time. I started to think about how during this time of quarantine, we are all a bit like turtles, hiding in our respective shells until it’s safe to come out again.

All of the sudden I realized, I had my concept. I decided to create a poster for the exhibition featuring a series of turtles inside their shells, with one overly curious turtle popping out. Just like health experts have encouraged us to stay in our homes and not to follow the example of the recent protesters, the message of the poster was “stay in your shell” as opposed to following the example of the foolish turtle who comes out too soon. I created several iterations of the posters before finally arriving at the final version, which included even more turtle shells in the series to convey a sense of a large community, like the city of St. Louis, that is all in this crisis together. I am not only happy with the final product, but it was also a really fun experience creating this poster. It seems that for me “going towards the fear” means continuing to make art, but for a moment, giving yourself permission to make with no purpose in mind, and come to find out, you end up finding your purpose anyway.