Back to The Drawing Board

Well, you know my name is Todd, and I like to do drawings...
Original images from How to Draw Almost Everything by Chika Miyata and How to Draw Almost Every Day by Kamo 

I'm taking a minor detour - I've now started two mini-series that have yet to reach a conclusion - but this blog is nothing if not a stream of consciousness stretched across several weeks, and the post today dovetails well with my one outlining my next steps to improve Exhibit Meh, so think of it as more of a corollary to my last post than a tangent.

I guess I'll say "improve," because one of the marketing differentiators I want to add to the site is my own artwork, and there's no accounting for taste.  Not necessarily to compete with the literal great works I put up there (my abilities won't be on par with those artists for another week or two), but to demonstrate certain concepts and details without me either combing through internet archives for content that isn't mine and is available without me needing to double-mortgage my house to pay the royalties or spending money on professionally produced content that will also require me to double-mortgage my house.  Call me selfish or stingy, but I firmly believe in the one house, one mortgage principle.

I've been drawing off and on for my entire life.  Like most people, it was something I practiced with abandon as a very small child.  I kept going consistently through high school, with a pen as my preferred medium on whatever folders or paper I had at hand.  I tended to sketch and didn't pay too much attention to the formal concepts of drawing, like proportion, shading, or perspective.  Doodling was one of the few things I wasn't self-conscious about as a teenager.  I took an intro art class and received a very solid above-average grade, but no expectations that I would ever be an Artist or an artiste.  I did receive some unsolicited encouragement from an art-capable student who thought my doodles were good (sadly, current me has been unable - so far - to match the proficiency or imagination of teenage me), which was nice (obviously, because I remember it now several decades after the fact).  

Then, suddenly, when I reached college, I inexplicably just stopped drawing.  Not because I necessarily found other hobbies or I felt that doodling was a childish habit I needed to put away, but simply because I stopped.  It's something I regret today.

But as with many regrets, they give us a chance to make atonement for our past blemishes.  Though I'd dabble here and there, I didn't make a concerted effort again to pick up any kind of drawing again until the mid 2010s.  This was shortly after I picked up guitar again in earnest and was consistently practicing until the Pandemic, when I just stopped again.  

Even though this was as recently as 2021, I can't really recall why I stopped, though between the demands of life and other hobbies, I made a semi-conscious decision to deprioritize it as a form of my artistic expression.

There were some minor factors that added up to contribute to this Second Abandonment - I prefer pencil for sketching, but I'm left handed, so a lot of my compositions can tend to smear (as a child I recall my left hand being covered in graphite); I wanted to explore color, but was intimidated by the myriad options for coloring media and making sure the colors wouldn't simply fade or bleed through the paper; and I wanted to digitize my creations, but didn't really want to invest in a tablet or spend the time snapping a photo of my artwork and figure out how to convert it into vector or raster art.  Plus, the available tablets that worked with a Linux system were limited and I stick almost exclusively with Linux.

But, then along came GenAI and, with it, the power to create all sorts of oddities under ethically dubious circumstances.  When I first started this blog, I'd post AI generated images to show the ridiculousness of the power we were giving these machines to supplant our livelihoods, but then I began to feel icky.

Using stock photos with open licenses made sense, because the author was providing explicit permission, but AI allowed me to "create" something without any effort on my part (other than maybe 5 minutes' worth of trial and error on a prompt) and without providing benefit to another artist who helped contribute to the overall body of work.  

I decided at that juncture to begin working on art that I could create myself.  Luckily, my goals are much more straight-forward than they have been in previous artistic ventures (where I'd want to know all the things, which would paralyze me from moving forward until I totally, completely, inexhaustibly grasped a concept).  I'm more interested in representational or instructional art rather than realism.  I want the illustrations to be digitally native, so I can easily add them to a site and manipulate them for animation purposes.  And I want to use color for what is, essentially, the first time in my life (but, again, for representational purposes, rather than realism).

These goals helped me choose Krita as my drawing software and a Wacom tablet as my drawing instrument.  The tablet is particularly challenging because its surface doesn't display what I'm drawing, so I'm looking at the screen on my laptop while drawing in a blind contour fashion, which leads to new adventures in hand-eye coordination.  My understanding is that this simply takes practice, and I have noticed improvement, but it's certainly a wrinkle I didn't expect at the outset and there are moments where I literally need to tell myself to breathe.

Still, despite the learning curve (and, I won't lie, occasional frustration), I find the effort worthwhile.  I've reached a point in my life where I can be patient and accept my limitations (with my hobbies at least), without immediately hitting a wall of perfectionism.

I've added a diagram to one of my upcoming pages on Exhibit Meh as a first step back into the visual arts world, and I expect to add more content here and as supporting documentation on Exhibit Meh, so, ready or not, here I come!

Until next time, my human and robot friends.