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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
There are some communities where the bar of entry is really very low. There are a lot of people are part of that commmunity, although many of the people who are in that community will not say they are part of it, because they believe that claiming membership in those communities requires a much higher level of skill or ability to meet what they perceive as the basics. This is ususally a situation where I reach for Ira Glass's commentary about the difference between skill and taste, and point out that most people think of membership in these kinds of communities is having met the threshold of skill meeting taste.
I do this, too. Even in the presence of other people saying that I am part of that community. Because there's both the skill-taste barrier, but also the tendency to make comparative statements and say that it's not possible that I can be part of that community because I'm not as good as other people who are also in this community.
I come back again to something that I talked about in an earlier December Days series, to point out to myself that I have been doing a fair amount of drawing since the last time I talked about it. I still don't believe skill has caught taste, and that's mostly because I'm in the copying phase. In previous iterations, I might have believed that I needed to improve significantly before I could begin to be part of the community of people who draw things, but truthfully, that's a community that's much bigger than we think, precisely because "people who draw things" is a community that doesn't have a requirement of skill, form, or specific elements. It's very inclusive.
There's a TED talk recorded (or maybe one of the sundry TEDx talks) that is about a person who works with dementia patients, I believe, or others with similar types of mental impairments, and walks through an exercise that he does with them (and with the audience), asking them to draw shapes close to each other that, when completed, looks like a cartoon face. The point, then, is that he's just taught all of the audience (and the patients) to draw something, and that even people with cognitive impairments can still learn to do new things, or can enjoy doing things that they haven't done before, or something like that.
Drawing things is one of those pursuits that appears to be encouraged in childhood and then, at a certain point where taste and skill have diverged, then drawing things no longer is encouraged (nor, for that matter, does there appear to be a lot of art encouraged at all past the point of the disparity getting to a certain point.) And, as I put in the older December Days entry, the acknowledgement of disparity is usually painted as an inability, rather than a disparity. "I can't draw" is shorthand for "My drawings do not meet what I believe the standard of a good drawing is." And given how much beautiful art there is around us and easily available to find on the Internet, or in the local gallery, or comic book store, it's very easy to internalize a standard of work that is on the level of "professionals" or "well-hyped and practiced amateurs" as the place where the entry line is for people who draw things. And if that's the standard, then, there's a lot of work that has to be put in to produce material of that standard, regardless of whether the style is more toonish, more manga, or more realistic. Some people put their effort elsewhere, other people give up in the belief that they won't achieve that standard, even with significant amounts of practice, drill, and tutorial work.
And then there's xkcd. Which doesn't need any more intricate art than what it has to be funny, incisive, or otherwise provide commentary on the quotidian and the corporate. Stick figures with the occasional bit of something else is all that Randall needs. (Admittedly, there's been a lot that's been added to this and some extremely expansive and interactive projects, but if someone wanted to start doing xkcd-like entities, the bar is not very high on the art side.)
One of the things that I've had to figure out how to do with my brain is to get it to stop throwing up blocks in the way. Another one of these entries will talk about the biggest block in my way, perfectionism, but there are other ones that also work toward the question of whether to engage in something where someone else might see it. One of the big ones is the possibility that someone else might look at a thing and not only judge it not up to their standards of taste, but vocalize that judgment or specifically make fun of the person who created it for not being to their taste. We have always known there are people who believe their tastes are universal and those who cannot match their tastes deserve ridicule, but it feels like in the age of the digitally connected and the "engagement" algorithms that there are more opportunities for those people to let their opinions be known and have a wider audience for them, and possibly then have other people of the same disposition join in once a target has been identified. For people who have trauma in relation to social situations, or people making fun of them for their traits or their actions, the possibility that someone might be a troll is sometimes enough to stop a thing from happening.
One of my most common and effective means of sidestepping a brain that doesn't want to let other people look at things and potentially make fun of them, is to explicitly make the thing temporary or otherwise change the situation so that instead of the thing being a reflection and judgment on the person who made it that will stand for-ev-er, the thing itself can exist for a limited amount of time and then it will be erased or replaced with something else. All of my whiteboard drawings have been put up with the explicit understanding that they may not last past the event they're advertising, and thus, I don't have to make them perfect. Or if someone doesn't like it, I can shrug and say that it'll get replaced with something else in the future. Or there's the possibility that the whole thing will get erased with someone else's need to promote their own program.
The other thing that I've been using about it is to recast the thing as some other entity. I'm not drawing things that are original I'm copying someone else's art style as best I can onto a different medium. It's not tracing a printed-out entity, but trying to replicate what I see on the screen in a different medium. Which is drawing practice, and also, the judgment there is not whether or not I was able to come up with something out of my own head, but how well did I replicate the thing in front of me with the lines that I put down, and the colors that I had available to me. Some effects and things don't fully translate to whiteboard marker. And I do a lot of "you see, this is why I like digital coloring, because I can just move the lineart to its own layer and then put blobs of color underneath it." to myself as I try to navigate the various adjustments that I have to make when using whiteboard marker. Because I'm not trying to do the same thing, or because I'm not trying to do something in my own "style," I can instead do the thing in front of me and see how well it goes over. And I've taken to including the text and an attribution as well, so that hopefully nobody tries to think that I'm the one who is coming up with these cute designs and drawing them.
It's gone over reasonably well in these terms, as practice, as copying, as just trying to provide some little bits of flair here and there to accompany program advertisements. There's not any pressure involved to make it anything more than it is. Much like when it came time to draw or otherwise do art projects for the kids on-line, there wasn't any pressure to make sure that something came out exactly right. If it came out approximately right, then that was fine. If someone tried to do it a different way, and that came out okay, that wsa fine. If it came out not quite right, that was also fine. When I was doing some of the draw-and-sip type events, when they show up at various events, it's not really a question of whether the people you're drawing with are all of the same skill level that you are, but whether you're having a good time doing the drawing. (If I spent the time being worried about my comparative lack of skill level, then I would be doing something else.) And some of the drawing challenges in those draw-and-sip ideas are meant to only take a minute or two, so that people have to work fast and can't second-guess or spend a lot of time redrawing or worry about how to fix the mistakes rather than incorporating them into the drawing.
And, honestly, all of it is practice in one way or another. Some things are easier to do after having done them once a week for a few weeks, and coming back to doing these whiteboard drawings each time means I'm slightly better at it this time around than I was the last time. Eventually skill might very well catch up to taste. Or maybe it won't. But I do know that I'm part of the community of people who draw things, and I feel a little less nervous or worried now about drawing things when given the opportunity to do so. At least, so long as it's not something that's srs bzns or otherwise set up in such a way that all of those brain blocks are going to come into play. I'm not planning on becoming a person who draws things professionally at any time. But the journey that started at "I Can't Draw" has managed to at least move to the point of "I don't draw professionally/well."
There are some communities where the bar of entry is really very low. There are a lot of people are part of that commmunity, although many of the people who are in that community will not say they are part of it, because they believe that claiming membership in those communities requires a much higher level of skill or ability to meet what they perceive as the basics. This is ususally a situation where I reach for Ira Glass's commentary about the difference between skill and taste, and point out that most people think of membership in these kinds of communities is having met the threshold of skill meeting taste.
I do this, too. Even in the presence of other people saying that I am part of that community. Because there's both the skill-taste barrier, but also the tendency to make comparative statements and say that it's not possible that I can be part of that community because I'm not as good as other people who are also in this community.
I come back again to something that I talked about in an earlier December Days series, to point out to myself that I have been doing a fair amount of drawing since the last time I talked about it. I still don't believe skill has caught taste, and that's mostly because I'm in the copying phase. In previous iterations, I might have believed that I needed to improve significantly before I could begin to be part of the community of people who draw things, but truthfully, that's a community that's much bigger than we think, precisely because "people who draw things" is a community that doesn't have a requirement of skill, form, or specific elements. It's very inclusive.
There's a TED talk recorded (or maybe one of the sundry TEDx talks) that is about a person who works with dementia patients, I believe, or others with similar types of mental impairments, and walks through an exercise that he does with them (and with the audience), asking them to draw shapes close to each other that, when completed, looks like a cartoon face. The point, then, is that he's just taught all of the audience (and the patients) to draw something, and that even people with cognitive impairments can still learn to do new things, or can enjoy doing things that they haven't done before, or something like that.
Drawing things is one of those pursuits that appears to be encouraged in childhood and then, at a certain point where taste and skill have diverged, then drawing things no longer is encouraged (nor, for that matter, does there appear to be a lot of art encouraged at all past the point of the disparity getting to a certain point.) And, as I put in the older December Days entry, the acknowledgement of disparity is usually painted as an inability, rather than a disparity. "I can't draw" is shorthand for "My drawings do not meet what I believe the standard of a good drawing is." And given how much beautiful art there is around us and easily available to find on the Internet, or in the local gallery, or comic book store, it's very easy to internalize a standard of work that is on the level of "professionals" or "well-hyped and practiced amateurs" as the place where the entry line is for people who draw things. And if that's the standard, then, there's a lot of work that has to be put in to produce material of that standard, regardless of whether the style is more toonish, more manga, or more realistic. Some people put their effort elsewhere, other people give up in the belief that they won't achieve that standard, even with significant amounts of practice, drill, and tutorial work.
And then there's xkcd. Which doesn't need any more intricate art than what it has to be funny, incisive, or otherwise provide commentary on the quotidian and the corporate. Stick figures with the occasional bit of something else is all that Randall needs. (Admittedly, there's been a lot that's been added to this and some extremely expansive and interactive projects, but if someone wanted to start doing xkcd-like entities, the bar is not very high on the art side.)
One of the things that I've had to figure out how to do with my brain is to get it to stop throwing up blocks in the way. Another one of these entries will talk about the biggest block in my way, perfectionism, but there are other ones that also work toward the question of whether to engage in something where someone else might see it. One of the big ones is the possibility that someone else might look at a thing and not only judge it not up to their standards of taste, but vocalize that judgment or specifically make fun of the person who created it for not being to their taste. We have always known there are people who believe their tastes are universal and those who cannot match their tastes deserve ridicule, but it feels like in the age of the digitally connected and the "engagement" algorithms that there are more opportunities for those people to let their opinions be known and have a wider audience for them, and possibly then have other people of the same disposition join in once a target has been identified. For people who have trauma in relation to social situations, or people making fun of them for their traits or their actions, the possibility that someone might be a troll is sometimes enough to stop a thing from happening.
One of my most common and effective means of sidestepping a brain that doesn't want to let other people look at things and potentially make fun of them, is to explicitly make the thing temporary or otherwise change the situation so that instead of the thing being a reflection and judgment on the person who made it that will stand for-ev-er, the thing itself can exist for a limited amount of time and then it will be erased or replaced with something else. All of my whiteboard drawings have been put up with the explicit understanding that they may not last past the event they're advertising, and thus, I don't have to make them perfect. Or if someone doesn't like it, I can shrug and say that it'll get replaced with something else in the future. Or there's the possibility that the whole thing will get erased with someone else's need to promote their own program.
The other thing that I've been using about it is to recast the thing as some other entity. I'm not drawing things that are original I'm copying someone else's art style as best I can onto a different medium. It's not tracing a printed-out entity, but trying to replicate what I see on the screen in a different medium. Which is drawing practice, and also, the judgment there is not whether or not I was able to come up with something out of my own head, but how well did I replicate the thing in front of me with the lines that I put down, and the colors that I had available to me. Some effects and things don't fully translate to whiteboard marker. And I do a lot of "you see, this is why I like digital coloring, because I can just move the lineart to its own layer and then put blobs of color underneath it." to myself as I try to navigate the various adjustments that I have to make when using whiteboard marker. Because I'm not trying to do the same thing, or because I'm not trying to do something in my own "style," I can instead do the thing in front of me and see how well it goes over. And I've taken to including the text and an attribution as well, so that hopefully nobody tries to think that I'm the one who is coming up with these cute designs and drawing them.
It's gone over reasonably well in these terms, as practice, as copying, as just trying to provide some little bits of flair here and there to accompany program advertisements. There's not any pressure involved to make it anything more than it is. Much like when it came time to draw or otherwise do art projects for the kids on-line, there wasn't any pressure to make sure that something came out exactly right. If it came out approximately right, then that was fine. If someone tried to do it a different way, and that came out okay, that wsa fine. If it came out not quite right, that was also fine. When I was doing some of the draw-and-sip type events, when they show up at various events, it's not really a question of whether the people you're drawing with are all of the same skill level that you are, but whether you're having a good time doing the drawing. (If I spent the time being worried about my comparative lack of skill level, then I would be doing something else.) And some of the drawing challenges in those draw-and-sip ideas are meant to only take a minute or two, so that people have to work fast and can't second-guess or spend a lot of time redrawing or worry about how to fix the mistakes rather than incorporating them into the drawing.
And, honestly, all of it is practice in one way or another. Some things are easier to do after having done them once a week for a few weeks, and coming back to doing these whiteboard drawings each time means I'm slightly better at it this time around than I was the last time. Eventually skill might very well catch up to taste. Or maybe it won't. But I do know that I'm part of the community of people who draw things, and I feel a little less nervous or worried now about drawing things when given the opportunity to do so. At least, so long as it's not something that's srs bzns or otherwise set up in such a way that all of those brain blocks are going to come into play. I'm not planning on becoming a person who draws things professionally at any time. But the journey that started at "I Can't Draw" has managed to at least move to the point of "I don't draw professionally/well."
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Date: 2024-12-11 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 05:42 am (UTC)