Right, so folks have been asking me, or maybe I’ve just been meaning to jot this down, about my whole dive into understanding what makes this Ty Cummings fella tick. Wasn’t straightforward, let me tell you. Took a fair bit of head-scratching, and if I’m honest, a few moments where I nearly threw in the towel.
Getting Started with This Ty Cummings Business
I first bumped into the name, Ty Cummings, you know, like you do. Floating around online, maybe someone at a meetup dropped it. Sounded like one of those characters who pops up and everyone starts nodding sagely. So, my curiosity got the better of me, as it usually does. Had to see what the big deal was. My first step was just to eyeball his work – whatever I could dig up. Sketches, finished pieces, articles, the lot. And looking at it, my first thought was, “Huh. Okay. That’s… a choice.” Not bad, not amazing, just… different. Kinda minimalist in places, maybe a bit abstract in others. Tough to stick a label on it, which, I guess, was part of the thing.
Anyway, the real “practice,” the nitty-gritty, kicked off when I figured, “Alright, I’m gonna try and make something that feels like his stuff.” Or at least, try to bottle some of that lightning. Seemed like a decent way to stretch the old creative muscles. Famous last words, eh?
Down in the Trenches: The Actual Grind
This is where the wheels nearly came off. I picked a specific idea, something I thought had that “Cummings vibe” – and don’t you dare ask me to spell out what that vibe is, ’cause figuring that out was half the bloody struggle! And I got down to it, trying to, you know, create. I’d sink hours into it, just pushing pixels around, changing up palettes, redrawing lines, whatever the task demanded.
My routine? Pretty glamorous, let me tell ya:
- Staring at a blank screen, feeling like the biggest dunce on the planet. Or worse, staring at my early attempts that looked like a dog’s breakfast.
- Having a flash of what I thought was pure genius. “Yes! This is IT!” Then, an hour later, I’d look again and just feel sick. Utter garbage.
- Dragging myself back to his original pieces, eyes practically popping out of my head, trying to reverse-engineer his brain. What in the blazes was he actually doing?
- Industrial quantities of coffee. Oh, and a fair bit of swearing at my monitor. My cat probably thought I was possessed. There were days, man, I seriously considered launching my keyboard across the room.
It was like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. You think you’ve got it, you reckon you understand, and then bam, it slithers right out of your grasp. Infuriating doesn’t even begin to cover it. I distinctly remember one week, a real low point, where I was so close to just packing it all in. Seriously thought, “Nope. This isn’t for me. I just don’t have it. He’s operating on some other frequency, and I’m stuck on AM radio.”
The Fog Starts to Lift (A Bit)
Now, I’d be lying if I said there was this one blinding flash, a “Eureka!” moment where everything clicked. Nah, it wasn’t like that. More like watching the fog slowly burn off on a chilly morning. What I started to twig, bit by bit, was that trying to straight-up copy his style, his exact moves, was a fool’s errand. That was my big screw-up at the start.
It was way more about getting under the hood, about trying to suss out the thinking that led to those choices. Why that particular shape? Why leave that space empty? It was the ‘why’ that started to matter more than the ‘what’.
And gradually, real gradually, my own efforts started to feel a tiny bit less like clumsy forgeries and a bit more like… well, like I was at least in the same ballpark, asking the same kind of questions, even if my answers weren’t as slick. The whole thing became less about “Ty Cummings” the icon, or “Ty Cummings” the specific aesthetic, and more about a certain way of looking at things, a different angle on tackling a problem.
So, that’s the long and short of my tussle with Ty Cummings. No magic formula, no quick wins. Just a whole lot of grind and banging my head against the wall. But that’s the only way you truly get to grips with something new, isn’t it? You gotta wade in and get thoroughly mucked up. I’m still no guru on the fella, not by a long shot. But I walked away with a much deeper respect for the process, for the sheer effort involved, and for the value of looking past the shiny surface. And that, if you ask me, is a pretty solid lesson to take from any kind of practice.
