Confused Creative

How else should I describe myself? These days, everyone has some sort of creative outlet that they tend to explore. You’ve got your traditional and digital artists, painters, animators. And then you have your fiber artists – costumers, knitters, tailors, etc. A step further, and you’ve got industrial creatives – woodworkers, metal smiths, jewelers. The list goes on and on and on. If it exists, there’s a creative output for it.

So where does that leave me?….Well…. I’m still trying to figure that out.

Education

In a formal setting, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Science, majoring in Graphic Design from Robert Morris University. For most, this usually equates to logo designs, animations, video production, etc. For me, this education mostly lead to my love of layout and production in the printing processes — and the never ending struggle of flipping a coffee table when I see RGB items being pushed through a CMYK process.

Jobs and Experiences

Thanks to my fine education, I was able to make my way into the newspaper publishing business. I started as a page designer and advertising creative for a local weekly newspaper, and then moved on to a publishing powerhouse, expanding from a prepress tech to quality control associate, and finally to a production systems coordinator. It’s been an amazing experience and journey that’s lasted for roughly 15 years that’s given me a well rounded standing when it comes to print production, and allowed me to find some new tricks of the trade to keep the journey going.

Okay, so what IS DreamingKey?

Well, Dreamingkey itself started as a sort of college project. First to note, growing up my homestead was a very old house, so old that for the first 8 years of my life or so, the house actually used a skeleton key to unlock the front and back doors. So, there’s always been a love of skeleton keys. Jumping from early childhood to teens, I became a pretty moderate gamer, and of course couldn’t help but jump into the world of “Kingdom Hearts” for obvious reasons.

So around the time “Kingdom Hearts” was just teasing to the “Birth by Sleep” chapter, there had been all this vague and mysterious marketing for it. Teaser quotes and secret movies, etc. So, in my “Kingdom Hearts” fangirl head, I had come with the idea that if something was going to have an epic impact in the story, and you were going with “Birth by Sleep”….. Well, what do you do when you sleep? You Dream. So I had this whole idea about a “Dreaming Keyblade.” I even had a design for it, and tried to make that my logo. I went the whole nine yards.

While the “Kingdom Hearts” fandom drifted away, the connection to the Dreaming Keyblade didn’t, and after reworking the initial idea, moving away from a fansite to a more personal site, the Dreaming Keyblade shifted to simply the DreamingKey. I’ve simplified the over-dramatic keyblade design to a simple small skeleton key, and went from there. So that is the how DreamingKey came to be.

As for where it’s going…. that goes back to the first part of this page. I’m a creative, that doesn’t know exactly what kind of creative I want to be going forward. But while I’m trying to figure it out, I can keep the journey here, and share when I occasionally do have something creative to share.