What Drawing Taught Me

The few who know me, know that I am somewhat of a writer. Sometimes good but mostly cringe inducing. I was once someone who taught that by writing sentences like “Then I paint the sky with these colours,” I would somehow produce this image of a romantic poet sitting on a stool on a stage, underneath a spotlight musing his soon to be popular rhymes. But after putting down the pair of rose-coloured glasses I used to wear when I was infatuated, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The result was a sudden jolt to my spine which crawled up to my collarbones, followed by intense body shakings as the cringe born from sudden realizations creep into my conscience.

Now, much like my incompetence in making jokes to capture your attention, in a similar self-deprecating fashion, I like to view myself similarly unskilled when it comes to a particular subject I am passionate about, drawing. The topic of drawing conjures different immediate conceptions across individuals. Some intuitively imagine the multitudes of appreciable artistry possessed within a single piece of drawing (overall art style, colour palette choices, etc.) while some may not share the same depth of appreciation but will still reserve their respect for the talent required to produce good drawings. If I were to put myself onto a spectrum with both of these views as the respective opposing ends, I will be positioned closer to “deeply appreciating” rather than “merely respecting.” This might be the case because I myself draw occasionally, thus exposing myself to the intricacies involved in translating a visual image onto a piece of blank canvas. To be truthful, the process of drawing is not as joyful as I would like to suggest. As any craft that requires effort and commitment, drawing can be frustrating at times. Seemingly menial problems such as not being able to draw the other eye, or to witness horrifying disproportions after flipping a nearly finished piece can sometimes cause huge disappointments. I can already hear my fellow artists screaming “OMG THAT IS SO TRUE!”

Drawing is definitely not a physically demanding endeavor, but it surely demands some form of mental maturity. Where a single additional painting stroke or a slight change in the angle at which a pencil is pressed onto a paper can make huge differences to the final piece, artists are forced to learn the art of balancing expectations of outcome envisioned in their heads with conscious realizations of the limitations imposed by their own current artistic capabilities (and more importantly ones imposed by external factors such as tools used). This resonates across any pursuits that require beginners to undergo some form of training before reaching expertise. Want to get better at Calculus? Start with the fundamentals of differentiation and integration. Want to get better at drawing humanoid figures? Most professionals that I have learned from online suggest brushing up on understanding basic shapes and breaking down references into simpler forms. As I spend more an more time with drawing, I began to realize the parallel it has with life itself. Being the skeptic that I was, I brushed off the initial epiphanies that I had as symptoms of useless apophenia. Slowly though, I find the lessons I learned to be too valuable to be ignored. And one particular lesson that I would like to put focus on is the ability to convince yourself to let go, and to stop.

I would like to include an excerpt from a book that had motivated me to finally put together the jumble of ideas I had in my head. It might be strange but this paragraph came from a book titled “4IR -Reinventing a Nation” written by Dinis Guarda and Rais Hussin.  The excerpt (a paragraph from an essay written by Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, the Special Advisor for UN Engagement and Blockchain Technology) goes as follows

“5G networks will support Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Massive Machine type Communication (mMTC), and Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). eMBB will enable a wide range of practical use of AR/VR with high bandwidth internet access, mMTC will drastically improve the ability of devices for sensing, metering, and monitoring with narrowband internet access, and URLLC will enhance the capability of latency sensitive devices that are essential for factory automation, self-driving cars, and remote surgery.’

Before I proceed, give a clap to yourself for understanding any of the technical jargons mentioned as I myself understand none of it. “Enhanced Mobile what?”  I said to myself before reading the first three lines of its Wikipedia page and eventually giving up. My younger self would go ham seeing all these technical terms and proceed to skim through multiple articles in an effort to gain sufficient enough understanding before proceeding. This, as anyone might expect is counterproductive as merely skimming through complex concepts without proper guidance or at least following a systematic “ground-up” learning process (basics first, fluffs later) will not provide anyone with the amount of knowledge sufficient enough to be considered as understood (unless you’re an outlier i.e., a genius). But I would like to not elaborate further on this since this is not the point that I want to stress on. What I would like to correlate with “convincing yourself to let go and to stop” in this context is somewhat akin to choosing your battles. I will direct this to drawing later but for now let’s see this through the lens of reading.

Reading is another activity that requires dedication, in such a way that it demands full attention and consume time as a resource. We invest our time to read, hoping to gain valuable knowledge in return. And since time is scarce, we cannot afford to do something that will not necessarily satisfy the goal of our reading. In the case of the “4IR -Reinventing a Nation” book, my goal was to gain insights on how a country can capitalize on the various inventions introduced by the fourth industrial revolution. Do I need to know what Enhanced Mobile Broadband is in order to satisfy this goal? Most probably yes. But do I need to know it now (when it is written in an introductory paragraph) or is it more efficient to just read the next paragraph and look into the concept further once I encounter discussions that pivot on it? I find the latter to be better. One step at a time. Now in order for me to do this, I had to learn to convince myself that it is okay to just “not know” what Enhanced Mobile Broadband means now, because it may or may not be important to my goal of understanding the book as a whole. It is not a matter of laziness or justifying consciously not putting in effort to understand convolutions. It is a matter of using my resources (in this case time) selectively. And to do this, I had to learn to let go of my anxiety of not fully understanding early on and stop myself from wasting time with mindless skimming. Hoarding my options will never serve me well as I will either waste too much time on something that is not relevant to my goal or spend too little time on them before they can be sufficiently meaningful. To do this I find it to be important to know what to heed and what to disregard. While adding things to be taken into account seems natural when it comes to comprehending things we perceive as profound, disregarding does not feel as good. There will be a lingering fear of missing out on important things, and honestly sometimes we will. But if we are going to play the probability game, then we should consider that it is possible to add meaningless things. Why play the infinite game and exhaust our resources when we can use our resources more efficiently by making mistakes (by leaving out important things) and consider the “important but was initially left out things” afterwards when we are aware that they need to be addressed.

It is important to note that the running idea that I want to emphasize is to “let go and to stop” and not about being procedural in taking on/learning any demanding activities. Drawing paints a clearer picture of this concept particularly when a work in progress piece is nearing its intended outcome. Different individuals approach their art differently. But all artworks share one common thing and that is they will all eventually reach their respective points of completion. The problem of completion points in art is that they are completely dependent on the artist. And since there are no yardsticks to be referred to, ascertaining whether an artwork can be considered as finished or not can be confusing. A lot of the time, a drawing piece is considered “done” when there is nothing more to add for it to fulfill its predetermined purpose. This tendency to associate completion with lack of further addition is naturally acquired since working on drawings is a process of adding features. After all, all drawings begin from empty canvases. The huge problem with associating addition and completion in the case of drawings is that it allows perpetual change. A drawing does not exhaust itself as a resource like marble sculpturing, but it builds upon itself. What this mean is that if the process of adding is left unchecked, the artist might find himself past the point at which his work perfectly defines his goal. You can use an eraser, corrective paint or whatever. But from experience, corrections will never leave the same clean impression compared to preemptive avoidance. Try to treat corrections as a sort of apology. You can say sorry but hey, I am still going to feel something about it. And do not try to argue using the undo feature that digital art provides. I am pretty confident that there is no such thing as an undo button in real life.

Now to put irrelevant addition into an absurd example, try to imagine someone who wishes to draw a realistic portrait. To fully realize this goal, they should not consider adding cat ears into the mix since obviously, humans with cat ears do not exist (unless Lord Elon decides to grant us our wish for catgirls). So, in order to create a realistic depiction of someone’s face, I should refrain from adding cat ears. So let go of my desire to draw cat ears, and stop myself from derailing off my initial tracks. A better example would be if someone wishes to produce a drawing with a consistent art style. A singular drawing’s art style can be defined by innumerous features so let’s reduce our scope to the number of lines drawn. We should also limit our focus on drawing hair (that rest on top of the head and not on any other body parts). The hair we have on our head is one of the most influential features that is capable of dictating how a portrait subject’s physical appearance is perceived. Lines are critical to drawing hairs according to your visualized image. Adding even one line can change the projected feel or imagery a drawing has. A single line can split a strand of hair into two, or even more. This is not trivial as it directly affects how the drawn hair is perceived. Thus, it is important to learn when to stop adding lines to hair before it turns out differently than we want. Important to note that this is within the context of nearing the point of completion i.e., applying final touch ups. The wariness of not adding unnecessary lines should also not be to the expense of adding necessary features. Again, there are no standards to this balance, but the artist will eventually learn as they progress. A French writer by the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes this balance in a succinct quote.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Sculpturing seems to be the best art form that can be used to tell the tale of life. Imagine the block of marble as life resources (time, energy, relationships, etc.), the chisel as decisions made throughout one’s life and the outcome as the reflection of one’s entire life. But sculpturing alone will never teach us the problem of paying unnecessary attentiveness. It will never force us to consider the problem of addition as it is essentially a reduction activity. Considering how we live in the age of abundance (abundance of information, potential wealth, connections, etc), focusing on what really matters becomes extremely hard. Life is now perceived as much bigger than simply making use of readily available resources to create a planned outcome; it is now filled with distracting potentials that can be considered. Why can’t I be a guitar player when YouTube is filled with thousands of tutorial videos? Why can’t I be an aspiring entrepreneur with my social media connections? These are obviously good in some contexts, but in abundance they are mere diversions. What is the bigger picture here? How is the final drawing envisioned? Have I been expending my attention to “cat ears” all this while? When should I stop? Is this drawing that I am working on going the way that I initially planned? Make no mistake that being wary of adding unnecessary things does not equal to being afraid of experimenting. Artists work on tremendous amount of works, and learn tremendously among the process. These works involve a lot of experiments and a lot of failures. Doing mistakes will always be the heart to the process of learning. One failed painting does not define one’s artistic capability, as how one mistake does not define one’s whole life. But when it comes to one specific drawing, as I add lines and shades to create the visuals that I want, I try to keep in mind that adding things is not automatically a good thing. In realising the goal of one drawing, I have learned to guide myself to sufficiency, not abundance. Doing this taught me the confidence to let go. To stop adding when it is time to leave things be.

Trying to draw parallel lines between one specific real-life activity to the grand idea of life can be very hard due to how context specific the analogies used can be. Adding wings to a lizard will give you a dragon instead of a bat, but if the goal is to experiment then so be it.