Finding joy in the creation of design

My master's thesis kind of developed out of some research that I did over the summer. My goal is to make an art center or a place where people can come and be creative. So the project itself is going to be, I guess, maybe the closest word would be like a compound, hopefully, a place where there's several different purposes of the building, and I wanted it specifically to be something that wasn't just geared toward art or artists, but toward what I just call makers with the capital "M". This was done with my own charcoal that I made. I chose six different areas of things to try and make myself that were things that I could use to produce my thesis with; paper, graphites, clay, ink making and watercolor. For paper, I decided to grow my own fiber. For art paper, specifically, the most popular fiber that is used is cotton. So I got permission from Virginia Tech and started researching not just the plant itself and how to grow it, but it was important to me to honor and learn about the history of cotton in America and especially the history of cotton as it intersected with the transatlantic slave trade and just make sure that I was knowledgeable about the plant that I was growing. These are some of the clay samples that are dried. These are some oak galls, what are called oak balls. They're abnormal things that grow on oak leaves. Basically, you can use these to make ink, black ink. These are three different materials that I have ground up into pigments so you'll be able to use either for making watercolor pigments or different types of inks. There are some of the charcoal vine charcoal sticks that I've made. This is graphite. So this is the way that I found it on the side of the road. It's incredibly crumbly. This is what it looks like when it's been kind of ground up into powder. Inks. I have so many inks. This one is made from copper. Black raspberry ink I found in my backyard. Black walnut ink, coffee ink. My favorite ink probably is the pokeberry ink, which technically is poisonous. You should not eat pokeberries, but any of the purple or kind of that pinkish that you see in any of my work is always the pokeberry ink. Being able to make something and not just say, This is out of my head, but this is out of coming from my hands, too. When I pin up, when I put my physical product on the wall, it's not just going to be my designs, but it's going to be on materials that have been made by my hands and that I can remember making, that I have experience making. It's also a great analogy for my thesis in general, which is that creativity is something that should be encouraged, explored and can give a lot of joy and a lot of unexpected thrills along the way.