Consistency Versus Novelty - How I Engage in the Battle

Page 1 Metamorphosis Artist's Book
​© Cherry Jeffs 2018
Acrylic on paper 25 cm x 21.7 cm

I’m in a perpetual fight between the need for consistency in my body of work versus my constant desire to explore new territory.

I’ve always struggled with doing things exactly the same way as I’ve done them before. 

Because of this I think I was subliminally putting off starting painting the pages of Metamorphosis - the companion Artist’s Book to Angel’s Trumpet despite  completing the covers a year ago.

Something deep within me was rebelling against doing another set of pages in the same style as the last ones.

Once I became aware of the source of the resistance I was able to tweak the work to stay within the parameters I’ve set myself but still introduce a bit of novelty for challenge.
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Checklist for Visual Consistency

At times like this I run through this checklist for consistency from Jason Horejs (owner of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, and author of Red Dot Blog). He says, ​
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“I use a simple, although admittedly subjective, metric...to judge consistency. I look at six criteria
Subject MatterStyleThemePaletteMediumPresentation
If the artist has achieved consistency in four of the six criteria across the work that is being presented to me, I will typically find the work to be consistent.”

 
A quick run down the list tells me I'm keeping the same

• Subject Matter ✔️
• Theme ✔️
• Medium ✔️
• Presentation ✔️

but for

• Style

I changed the background from cream to buff to explore a style I’d seen in some Japanese paintings
and in the

• Palette

I added some bronze areas rather than using only brown-black for the design

As a result, my resistance receded and I felt excited about getting to work. The first page of  “Metamorphosis” is now complete.​

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How do you achieve creative consistency?

Do you establish criteria in advance to make sure that your body of work is consistent? To do this is part of developing a Body of Work. 

​A Body of Work is a cohesive series of work that share consistent elements. 
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But how do you pick these out of all the elements in your work? And how do you know that these aspects of your art are ones you’ll be excited about working with for a long time to come?

The exercises in this workbook will show you how to do just that!

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