I spend a fair bit of time on Instagram & YouTube, looking for tutorials to help aid me in my miniature endeavors. While I do love to experiment & learn by my own works, I also found it wonderfully useful to absorb & build upon the knowledge of others. Watching tutorials on Illustrator has been especially illuminating. I can tell I'm watching the video of a real master (like The Design Ninja) when I've learned half a dozen better, faster, smoother ways of creating before we even get to the actual lesson the video is about.
This video had a similar feeling.
Although everything Cath is doing is simple & straight forward, her video absolutely wowed me & had my mind galloping down a dozen new paths. One thing I'm learning on this miniatures journey is that not only am I a visual person, I'm a visual person who adores loving from videos in particular. Photos are great & often not just super-helpful, but also helpful enough to show me what to do. But videos...even seeing things like how hard someone presses down to apply a material or if they use their fingers or go for the tweezers to position an accessories tells me more valuable information that makes my own creating a richer experience.
For this coffee shop, I much prefer her version; to me, the very mod, straight exterior window walls gave this space a sort of warehouse-converted-to-coffeehouse feel that the original kitschy interior (though quite cute in its own right!) didn't really jive with. I loved seeing what she used from the original kit, what she set aside, and what she added from scratch, to give this coffee house a better look.
I did previously look at this kit & mentally disregard it as a possible purchase, because it really just wasn't my style. But after watching Cath's video, not only am I seriously reconsidering this kit, I'm reconsidering a lot of kits that I hadn't thought were close enough to my style to make work. & I'll be going into looking at future kits with a mind that is far more open than it was previously.
What better lesson could I hope to learn from any video?