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silveradept[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.)
There are many things that I would like to acquire the skills for, and often times the barrier is deciding I want to obtain those skills enough that I set aside time to practice them consistently. Art skill also carries some additional baggage with it, because art skill is one of the most common situations where people find out whether they have a fixed or growth mindset. The way that it's often taught in schools (assuming that the school has any kind of artistic coursework or curriculum at all and hasn't had all of their fine arts programming cut out of the budget to focus on test scores or "core curriculum" or other excuses to get rid of art because it's not sufficiently quantifiable that the examinations can be reduced to a multiple-choice bubble-filling exercise. Or that it won't result in someone gaining the skills they need for consistent, gainful employment in the working world thanks to the destruction of the patronage system.) is a question of whether someone can replicate an example piece within tolerance. Many "arts and crafts" kinds of programs are interested in the end product and how well it relates to the example, rather than teaching the process by which the product is produced, and trying to grade on whether the process was followed, or how well the process was followed, even if the product may or may not turn out anything like the example work. For people who have the skill to replicate the example item, product-based instruction works fine. For people who don't have the skill to replicate the example item, or for whom learning the skill will be difficult, or who need additional time and practice and perhaps someone who can help them look at the problem in another way so that it makes sense to them, product-based instruction is only going to make them miserable. They won't be able to replicate the example, and that generally leads toward the conclusion of "I'm just not good at this."
The poles of the fixed and growth mindset are the beliefs as to whether someone is innately good at something and will be able to create to the limits of their natural talent (fixed mindset), or whether, even if they have no natural "talent" that will make the process easier, they can acquire the skills to do something (growth mindset). For things like reading, mathematics, science, and language acquisition, we are all generally in agreement that these subjects can and should be taught to everyone, regardless of what innate talent they might have for them, because they are necessary for functioning in a society. For all people, even ones who will have greater difficulties due to disabilities, we have a growth mindset in these subjects, and we (theoretically) deploy resources to assist those people who have skill-building difficulties so they get extra reps with the process of doing these things until they can do so confidently and apply the process to novel situations successfully. For the fine arts, however, even in those places that still have a fine arts program, we seem to be much more willing to accept the fixed mindset, that there will be same students that are good at one form or another of art, and those that have that innate talent continue to developing it and those who don't are shuffled in other directions where their talents supposedly lay. There isn't sustained practice time and resources deployed to help students understand fine arts better or to work the process sufficiently that they can develop their "style," even if it isn't something they're going to make a career in, or even use for much of anything outside of the class. The process itself, and figuring out the process, is the important part, not the product, but fine arts doesn't provide this repetition in school, and by the time university rolls around, the fixed mindset has taken usually taken hold.
This also happens with athletics, even though many of the examples we have of people who do become professional or Olympians in their discipline have been training for this since they were very small. Notice, though, how little there is talk about their training and how much more there is about their talent. Or that United States media tends to talk disparagingly about systems that engage in tracking and testing of possible aptitiudes early on so they can be shunted into those intensive training programs. Usually because it's governments that are doing the tracking and testing and training, rather than parents who have decided they are going to train the next phenoms and make sacrifices that will permit them to go through the same kinds of grueling training and schedules that the national training institutes do. There seems to be a resistance in both arts and athletics to the idea that you can, in fact, train up a reasonably competent artist or athlete, even if they will not necessarily become a standout or a superstar, with time, practice, and supports. It might make people believe that the same could happen with other disciplines, like finance or business, and therefore the veneration of the CEO and the President the United States practices is based entirely in a false belief that these are somehow extraordinary people who deserve the riches and power they wield because of their exceptionalism, when many or most of them are products of a system that trains them and they benefit from enormous amounts of privilege and support in their lives. Supports that could theoretically be torn down and their proceeds redistributed so that everyone succeeds more.
Getting back on topic, as with "I am not a coder," it's worth examining what we consider the standard of success for an artist. Much like coding, the praise and the designation of being a "real" artist comes from, as was famously quipped, looking at a block of stone and removing everything that isn't an elephant. Or a blank canvas, a blank sheet of paper, or similar. The ability to create ex nihilo is what makes you an artist, with the additional idea that the thing you are creating has to look exactly the way you envision it. (Substitute appropriately if you are aphantastic or otherwise don't use the visual metaphor in your artistry.) In turn, this ability to create seems magical, but there are also exceedingly detailed guides in existence for basically any and all kinds of art styles that purport to teach you the skills you need to start creating things that match your taste, and that will also teach you the theory behind your desired art styles art so that you can more effectively make consistent art in that way. Some of these guides are available for gratis, some are expensive. The tools and the media, especially in the digital world, can also be gratis or expensive, and some of them help the process by letting the computer do some of the work. And some forms of art, like machinima or brick pics, are specifically about repurposing assets that have already been created to tell different stories with them. (And someties what you do is take a shot glass in the shape of a urinal and make a replica of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," complete with a small gallery card for the exhibit, because it's funny.)
Furthermore, even people who are in the business of drawing, sculpting, or otherwise being a professional artist don't create everything they have from inside their own heads. New York City's been photographed enough, I'm sure, from sufficient angles that a computer program could build a model of the city and place everything in its proper place, light it correctly, and stitch it all together just from the photographs that have been uploaded to the Web. If you're drawing backgrounds for a comic, there's probably a photograph somewhere that you can use as a reference when you need to know what it would look like for the angle that you're trying to catch Spidey, or Avengers, or other mutants and supers in the city. And you're probably drawing from at least some reference documents from other artists as to what those characters look like, even if you're drawing them in your way, because the character still has to remain recognizably themselves. I know there are artists out there with three-dimensional figure dolls to help them with drawing poses, or who make faces in their mirror to try and capture an expression, and there's an entire profession of people whose job it literally is to wear a suit with sensors on it and then do movements so computers can understand how the body moves when doing certain tasks and replicate that movement with digital characters. People who use prose as their medium of choice still sometimes consult visual references, interview people, or have people who check their prose to make sure they're not committing errors in the representation of other people and their cultures. Undergirding all of that seeming creation from nothing is a lot of practice, a lot of reference material, and a fair amount of time spent understanding how forms are put together and then stylized so they have a consistent language.
For us amateurs, as well as for the professionals, there's always the method of eyeballing it and seeing what happens. (Or tracing it to learn how things are constructed and the motions needed.) And if you have managed, as I have, to engage in a fair amount of shoving your brain sideways so that you can slide around the blocks that are there, and usually self-imposed to boot, then you can sometimes convince yourself to try doing things because they're sufficiently low-stakes and temporary that it won't matter. If the audience that's going to see what you're drawing is a bunch of ten year-olds, well, yes, ten year-olds can be harsh, but they're just as interested in showing you their work as they are seeing yours, and as the responsible adult in the room, you spend more time on their stuff than yours. The point is the process, not the product, and weirdly enough, that often works on me. I can draw something and show it to some ten year-olds during virtual programming. It's not going to be up to my taste, but it's fine. Process. Many of those things that I did for virtual programming over the "library's closed for the pandemic" sessions are things I didn't think I had the knack for, or could produce something decent for (fixed mindset), but that I could at least give the process a go and see what came out of it. And a lot of the time, I made at least an approximation of the thing that was supposed to be the model. Exact replicas? Not so much. Good enough for the environment I was in? Absolutely.
Producing some drawings for a zine we were making to accompany a take-and-make? Sure, why not. Kids will see it, and zines are supposed to be kind of lo-fi anyway, right? Doing a little doodle on the whiteboard sign advertising my Story Time, changing the character that I was looking at and trying to eyeball each week? Sure. It's a dry erase marker drawing, it's not expected to look super fancy, and if it's recognizable as the character, that's fine. (Even did the director of the system on the week she visited my story time to capture some marketing footage. Still not completely sure I captured enough of her likeness to make it obvious, but apparently when she came in, she looked at it and there may have been enough of a beat in looking at it that she might have recognized herself in it?) Doing a little drawing of some grasses and a pond and trying my hand at rendering Basho to accompany it? Sure. (The drawing turned out better than my calligraphy both times I did it, I'm pretty sure.) Trying to render my Pokemon Go avatar on paper, getting it okay if not exact, and then throwing that up as a profile picture? Yeah, okay. I like it enough to use it, even though there's a lot about it that's wrong or out of proportion. Trying to put together something that looks like one of the Among Us crew with a mitre on so I can make a terrible joke based on the fact that part of a sign was being obscured so it said "sus Cares About You?" Yeah, okay, the joke is worth it, honestly, and if it looks a bit on the crude side, then that's okay, that fits the Among Us aethetic anyway. Doodling a fanart for someone on a Post-It note for their birthday and getting up the courage to show it to them? Yeah, have done, seemed to go over well enough.
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.)
There are many things that I would like to acquire the skills for, and often times the barrier is deciding I want to obtain those skills enough that I set aside time to practice them consistently. Art skill also carries some additional baggage with it, because art skill is one of the most common situations where people find out whether they have a fixed or growth mindset. The way that it's often taught in schools (assuming that the school has any kind of artistic coursework or curriculum at all and hasn't had all of their fine arts programming cut out of the budget to focus on test scores or "core curriculum" or other excuses to get rid of art because it's not sufficiently quantifiable that the examinations can be reduced to a multiple-choice bubble-filling exercise. Or that it won't result in someone gaining the skills they need for consistent, gainful employment in the working world thanks to the destruction of the patronage system.) is a question of whether someone can replicate an example piece within tolerance. Many "arts and crafts" kinds of programs are interested in the end product and how well it relates to the example, rather than teaching the process by which the product is produced, and trying to grade on whether the process was followed, or how well the process was followed, even if the product may or may not turn out anything like the example work. For people who have the skill to replicate the example item, product-based instruction works fine. For people who don't have the skill to replicate the example item, or for whom learning the skill will be difficult, or who need additional time and practice and perhaps someone who can help them look at the problem in another way so that it makes sense to them, product-based instruction is only going to make them miserable. They won't be able to replicate the example, and that generally leads toward the conclusion of "I'm just not good at this."
The poles of the fixed and growth mindset are the beliefs as to whether someone is innately good at something and will be able to create to the limits of their natural talent (fixed mindset), or whether, even if they have no natural "talent" that will make the process easier, they can acquire the skills to do something (growth mindset). For things like reading, mathematics, science, and language acquisition, we are all generally in agreement that these subjects can and should be taught to everyone, regardless of what innate talent they might have for them, because they are necessary for functioning in a society. For all people, even ones who will have greater difficulties due to disabilities, we have a growth mindset in these subjects, and we (theoretically) deploy resources to assist those people who have skill-building difficulties so they get extra reps with the process of doing these things until they can do so confidently and apply the process to novel situations successfully. For the fine arts, however, even in those places that still have a fine arts program, we seem to be much more willing to accept the fixed mindset, that there will be same students that are good at one form or another of art, and those that have that innate talent continue to developing it and those who don't are shuffled in other directions where their talents supposedly lay. There isn't sustained practice time and resources deployed to help students understand fine arts better or to work the process sufficiently that they can develop their "style," even if it isn't something they're going to make a career in, or even use for much of anything outside of the class. The process itself, and figuring out the process, is the important part, not the product, but fine arts doesn't provide this repetition in school, and by the time university rolls around, the fixed mindset has taken usually taken hold.
This also happens with athletics, even though many of the examples we have of people who do become professional or Olympians in their discipline have been training for this since they were very small. Notice, though, how little there is talk about their training and how much more there is about their talent. Or that United States media tends to talk disparagingly about systems that engage in tracking and testing of possible aptitiudes early on so they can be shunted into those intensive training programs. Usually because it's governments that are doing the tracking and testing and training, rather than parents who have decided they are going to train the next phenoms and make sacrifices that will permit them to go through the same kinds of grueling training and schedules that the national training institutes do. There seems to be a resistance in both arts and athletics to the idea that you can, in fact, train up a reasonably competent artist or athlete, even if they will not necessarily become a standout or a superstar, with time, practice, and supports. It might make people believe that the same could happen with other disciplines, like finance or business, and therefore the veneration of the CEO and the President the United States practices is based entirely in a false belief that these are somehow extraordinary people who deserve the riches and power they wield because of their exceptionalism, when many or most of them are products of a system that trains them and they benefit from enormous amounts of privilege and support in their lives. Supports that could theoretically be torn down and their proceeds redistributed so that everyone succeeds more.
Getting back on topic, as with "I am not a coder," it's worth examining what we consider the standard of success for an artist. Much like coding, the praise and the designation of being a "real" artist comes from, as was famously quipped, looking at a block of stone and removing everything that isn't an elephant. Or a blank canvas, a blank sheet of paper, or similar. The ability to create ex nihilo is what makes you an artist, with the additional idea that the thing you are creating has to look exactly the way you envision it. (Substitute appropriately if you are aphantastic or otherwise don't use the visual metaphor in your artistry.) In turn, this ability to create seems magical, but there are also exceedingly detailed guides in existence for basically any and all kinds of art styles that purport to teach you the skills you need to start creating things that match your taste, and that will also teach you the theory behind your desired art styles art so that you can more effectively make consistent art in that way. Some of these guides are available for gratis, some are expensive. The tools and the media, especially in the digital world, can also be gratis or expensive, and some of them help the process by letting the computer do some of the work. And some forms of art, like machinima or brick pics, are specifically about repurposing assets that have already been created to tell different stories with them. (And someties what you do is take a shot glass in the shape of a urinal and make a replica of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," complete with a small gallery card for the exhibit, because it's funny.)
Furthermore, even people who are in the business of drawing, sculpting, or otherwise being a professional artist don't create everything they have from inside their own heads. New York City's been photographed enough, I'm sure, from sufficient angles that a computer program could build a model of the city and place everything in its proper place, light it correctly, and stitch it all together just from the photographs that have been uploaded to the Web. If you're drawing backgrounds for a comic, there's probably a photograph somewhere that you can use as a reference when you need to know what it would look like for the angle that you're trying to catch Spidey, or Avengers, or other mutants and supers in the city. And you're probably drawing from at least some reference documents from other artists as to what those characters look like, even if you're drawing them in your way, because the character still has to remain recognizably themselves. I know there are artists out there with three-dimensional figure dolls to help them with drawing poses, or who make faces in their mirror to try and capture an expression, and there's an entire profession of people whose job it literally is to wear a suit with sensors on it and then do movements so computers can understand how the body moves when doing certain tasks and replicate that movement with digital characters. People who use prose as their medium of choice still sometimes consult visual references, interview people, or have people who check their prose to make sure they're not committing errors in the representation of other people and their cultures. Undergirding all of that seeming creation from nothing is a lot of practice, a lot of reference material, and a fair amount of time spent understanding how forms are put together and then stylized so they have a consistent language.
For us amateurs, as well as for the professionals, there's always the method of eyeballing it and seeing what happens. (Or tracing it to learn how things are constructed and the motions needed.) And if you have managed, as I have, to engage in a fair amount of shoving your brain sideways so that you can slide around the blocks that are there, and usually self-imposed to boot, then you can sometimes convince yourself to try doing things because they're sufficiently low-stakes and temporary that it won't matter. If the audience that's going to see what you're drawing is a bunch of ten year-olds, well, yes, ten year-olds can be harsh, but they're just as interested in showing you their work as they are seeing yours, and as the responsible adult in the room, you spend more time on their stuff than yours. The point is the process, not the product, and weirdly enough, that often works on me. I can draw something and show it to some ten year-olds during virtual programming. It's not going to be up to my taste, but it's fine. Process. Many of those things that I did for virtual programming over the "library's closed for the pandemic" sessions are things I didn't think I had the knack for, or could produce something decent for (fixed mindset), but that I could at least give the process a go and see what came out of it. And a lot of the time, I made at least an approximation of the thing that was supposed to be the model. Exact replicas? Not so much. Good enough for the environment I was in? Absolutely.
Producing some drawings for a zine we were making to accompany a take-and-make? Sure, why not. Kids will see it, and zines are supposed to be kind of lo-fi anyway, right? Doing a little doodle on the whiteboard sign advertising my Story Time, changing the character that I was looking at and trying to eyeball each week? Sure. It's a dry erase marker drawing, it's not expected to look super fancy, and if it's recognizable as the character, that's fine. (Even did the director of the system on the week she visited my story time to capture some marketing footage. Still not completely sure I captured enough of her likeness to make it obvious, but apparently when she came in, she looked at it and there may have been enough of a beat in looking at it that she might have recognized herself in it?) Doing a little drawing of some grasses and a pond and trying my hand at rendering Basho to accompany it? Sure. (The drawing turned out better than my calligraphy both times I did it, I'm pretty sure.) Trying to render my Pokemon Go avatar on paper, getting it okay if not exact, and then throwing that up as a profile picture? Yeah, okay. I like it enough to use it, even though there's a lot about it that's wrong or out of proportion. Trying to put together something that looks like one of the Among Us crew with a mitre on so I can make a terrible joke based on the fact that part of a sign was being obscured so it said "sus Cares About You?" Yeah, okay, the joke is worth it, honestly, and if it looks a bit on the crude side, then that's okay, that fits the Among Us aethetic anyway. Doodling a fanart for someone on a Post-It note for their birthday and getting up the courage to show it to them? Yeah, have done, seemed to go over well enough.
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.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:15 am (UTC)One of my pet peeves is when people say "I can't draw." I wish they would say "I am not interested in drawing enough to spend all the time and effort to learn to do it." I also hate it when people say to me, "You're so talented! I can't even draw a straight line!" Then they proceed to tell me I should sell my work, which also really annoys me. (Why am I telling you all my pet peeves? ha!)
The fixed and growth mindsets -this puts into words something I think about but have not been able to articulate.
Thank you for your post!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 06:02 pm (UTC)Fixed and growth mindsets were very helpful in understanding how humans talk about talent versus effort and how one of them is much more lauded than the other.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 06:05 pm (UTC)The more that I try to do things, the more that I see some forms are easier to render than others.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 07:16 pm (UTC)One thing I read a while back also mentioned the people who often end up "good at art" are simply the ones that were encouraged to do it when they were young. Nearly everyone will doodle as a kid or will like to color or something, but some of us who maybe did start with a smidge better developed motor skills or focus or simply have very encouraging adults around get praised and continue to develop and others won't and stop over time. Particularly as you get older and everyone's ability to see what is "good" improves and they look at their own work and think it's not at the same level and therefore not worth it (which isn't true, like you said the process is also a valuable part of it, but it can be hard to feel that when you feel like the end product isn't what you wish it could be).
But it's really unfortunate society tends to teach us that creativity is simply something innate and not a learned skill. Because yeah developing anybskill is more about doing the things even when you feel like you're not good enough, which makes you get better over time. (Which if people don't want to spend time on it is also fine, just wish people saw it more as a choice they are making.)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-13 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-14 02:57 am (UTC)I'm reasonably good at drawing as an adult, and have been offered money for some of my paintings, but I didn't go for it as a career.