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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#12: "I Can't Draw."
When I think about statements like this one, I often reach for Ira Glass's commentary about the difference between skill and taste, and how people who are exercising a skill have to keep grinding away at it, even if they don't feel like the end results are good. For Ira, it's because we have good taste and we know what's aesthetically pleasing to us, but we don't yet have the skills and practice put in where we can create things that are to our taste with the skills that we have. (Unfortunately for all of us, Ira says there's no real shortcut to getting skills to match taste, so it's better for us to get started on doing things that aren't up to taste now, so that we get them out of the way and build from them and get that much more practice toward creating things that will be to our tastes.)
( And speaking of practice... )
None of this is creation ex nihilo, so it's not "drawing" in the same way that none of the snippeting and tweaking of code and looking up the examples is "coding." It's looking at visual references and trying to figure out how their lines and shapes work so I can do it in a way that makes sense to me and that I believe it will work. Sometimes it works more easily than others. But I'm getting in practice at both doing the thing and letting others see the thing by shifting my mental process about it so that, much like with the video games example, instead of seeing it as some kind of permanent statement of my worth, it's something that I'm doing as a doodle, without any expectation of perfection or having to be an exact replica. It'll be up long enough for the Story Time, and then I can take it into the back and someone else will erase it for when they need that whiteboard space for their own program announcement or design. Watching some of the cartooning talks or other bits that break down the lines that can create things helps, too, or show that "everyone can draw" by putting together some of the smaller constructions into cartoons or caricature types of drawing and producing stick figures that go along with it. I think we've managed to convince myself that, once again, I'm using very specific criteria as to what "counts" that's going to make it as difficult as possible to do something that would "count," rather than taking me where I am and being willing to go through a process that results in a drawing, and therefore, I can draw.
#12: "I Can't Draw."
When I think about statements like this one, I often reach for Ira Glass's commentary about the difference between skill and taste, and how people who are exercising a skill have to keep grinding away at it, even if they don't feel like the end results are good. For Ira, it's because we have good taste and we know what's aesthetically pleasing to us, but we don't yet have the skills and practice put in where we can create things that are to our taste with the skills that we have. (Unfortunately for all of us, Ira says there's no real shortcut to getting skills to match taste, so it's better for us to get started on doing things that aren't up to taste now, so that we get them out of the way and build from them and get that much more practice toward creating things that will be to our tastes.)
( And speaking of practice... )
None of this is creation ex nihilo, so it's not "drawing" in the same way that none of the snippeting and tweaking of code and looking up the examples is "coding." It's looking at visual references and trying to figure out how their lines and shapes work so I can do it in a way that makes sense to me and that I believe it will work. Sometimes it works more easily than others. But I'm getting in practice at both doing the thing and letting others see the thing by shifting my mental process about it so that, much like with the video games example, instead of seeing it as some kind of permanent statement of my worth, it's something that I'm doing as a doodle, without any expectation of perfection or having to be an exact replica. It'll be up long enough for the Story Time, and then I can take it into the back and someone else will erase it for when they need that whiteboard space for their own program announcement or design. Watching some of the cartooning talks or other bits that break down the lines that can create things helps, too, or show that "everyone can draw" by putting together some of the smaller constructions into cartoons or caricature types of drawing and producing stick figures that go along with it. I think we've managed to convince myself that, once again, I'm using very specific criteria as to what "counts" that's going to make it as difficult as possible to do something that would "count," rather than taking me where I am and being willing to go through a process that results in a drawing, and therefore, I can draw.
