Drawing Conclusions

 

Artist's representation of Chicago's Water Tower

I'm currently generating content to spruce up my company's home page as part of my landing page business experiment, and, since the name of my company is Coastal Chicago, I decided I'm going to use Chicago-themed content to populate the site.  In order to personalize my content for my brand, I'm putting my burgeoning drawing abilities to use.

The above drawing - if you're not into reading captions - is a representation of Chicago's Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1871.

For comparison, here's a photo of the actual tower:

Bernt Rostad, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

While (re)learning to draw and simultaneously maintaining a mini art history site, I've become attuned to simple details that make images look more polished, even if they're simple representations.  It's amazing what a simple shadow or a minor detail can add to an otherwise (literal) 2-D representation.  While pondering those observations, I veered into thinking about some of the similarities between trying to draw and trying to start a small business.  This blog post is an attempt to demonstrate those similarities.

The most difficult part of starting a business for me has been choosing a niche.  I still haven't selected one that I can hone in on and think "hmm, this definitely has the potential for a nice 5-figure (or 4-figure or 3-figure) pay day."  

The same can be said for selecting a subject for drawing.  In my case, I'm looking for subjects that represent Chicago well.  The skyline, in aggregate, is fairly famous, but each of the individual buildings themselves may not be instantly recognizable (interestingly, the Sears Tower - which is what everyone in Chicago still calls it despite being renamed over a decade ago - is generally less recognizable than the Hancock Tower - which has also been renamed), and drawing the skyline - even as a simplified representation - is probably a little more complicated than I want my first subject to be.  

The Water Tower may be less recognizable to tourists, but it's a good symbolic representation of the city, and it's a single building, so, in theory, it should be easier to draw than an entire skyline.  Much more so than relying on my business acumen, my ability to select a principal subject was a fairly smooth decision.

Next, I needed to decide if I was going to attempt a realistic drawing, concentrating on proper proportion, shading, and perspective.  This would be analogous to looking for a market-making or market-beating idea in the business world.  The equivalent of a "unicorn" as all the VC kids liked to say five years ago.  Ideas of that caliber require a lot of due diligence and comprehensive business plans with a high likelihood of failure.

In my case, reaching that level of artistry would require significant study and practice, with no guarantee that I could attain the level of expertise to represent the building realistically, so I decided to opt for something simpler.

Even following a simpler model, I need to start with a proof of concept to ensure I even have the capability of reaching my vision:

I can create basic shapes!

So far, so good.  I'm at least able to capture some of the basic forms in relative proportion.  And, since I chose not to opt for a higher level of realism, I don't need to worry if the dimensions are exact (or even if the components are at right angles to each other or the page).

Even if I'm choosing a simpler style, I still need to capture the essence of the building.  It doesn't need to be instantly recognizable, but it needs to be recognizable if given an appropriate context.  If you're looking at my drawing and the photo and still don't see a similarity, even after I've explicitly told you it's Chicago's Water Tower, then I've failed in my objective.

From the business standpoint, I'll mix my metaphors here a bit.  First, getting a realistic enough representation is like making sure you've identified a target market for your business.  Otherwise, you're simply building an abstract concept that no one is going to recognize/purchase.  

Second, in whittling away details, you're deciding which features are core to your offering.  I could attempt to add every turret and embellishment to my Water Tower drawing, but do I need to do that in order to draw an appropriate representation?  That level of detail takes significantly more time, and I'm much more likely to crowd the drawing or place a detail in the wrong place that will skew the representation.  In business, this is akin to stuffing your product with features that aren't needed for a minimum viable product launch.

And, as with all good business owners/artists, I looked around at the competition for inspiration before implementing my plan.  In addition to photos, I looked for Water Tower illustrations.  There were surprisingly few (indicating there's healthy growth potential in the market), but a few vector art representations did give me a few ideas on what to simplify.

After deciding what I needed to remove for an MVP, I had to decide what to add in order to differentiate my drawing/product offering from others.  In my case, I decided to add color.  One of the reasons the Water Tower stands out is that it's a 150+ year old limestone building sitting in the middle of gleaming skyscrapers on Michigan Avenue.  The limestone - and the yellowish color associated with it - is a key characteristic of the building.  The fact that it looks like a castle rather than a water pumping station is also important, so I needed to add a few highlights that show the brick detail of the building.

Finally, I added some flourish to stand out against my competitors, even if it violated the realism of the representation.  I didn't want to make it so egregious that it's unrecognizable, but I wanted to do something that reinforces my brand.  In my case, I decided to color the windows cornflower blue, tying the building to the colors of the Chicago flag and the Midwestern roots of the city.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you tie learning to draw to learning to business.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.