“One of the things you’ll hear people say, when they tell me they wish they could draw, is, ‘I see it in my head, but I can’t get it onto the page.’ And then I have to remind them that what they’re seeing in their head is not a drawing. Drawing is something that has to come out of your body.”
—Lynda Barry
See also: Why it’s hard to fake kids’ drawings
Here’s a video my friend Dan Roam and I recorded for his Napkin Academy about how to stay creative in good times and bad. Dan is so good at what he does — I remember seeing him give a presentation at SXSW five years ago and 20 minutes later everybody in the room wanted to buy a copy of Show & Tell. We always have fun, and I’m already looking forward to the next time.
To warm up for the past couple mornings I’ve pulled out my trusty ol’ Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and filled a page in my diary before writing. (Hard not to be influenced when reading Lynda Barry!) The pen is probably half a decade old, and still works like new. Something magical about drawing with this thing…
Here are Galileo’s drawings of the moon, made over 400 years ago. And here are my comparatively pathetic doodles of the moon phases, copied from online diagrams yesterday in my diary to try to memorize them:
Why bother copying a diagram of the moon? Because copying is how we learn, of course, and in the course of learning how to learn again, I’ve discovered that if you want to understand something, you need to draw it out, with your own pencil and paper, to force yourself to really look at what you’re copying and internalize it.
Even better if you can start sneaking what you’re learning into your work:
Filed under: the moon
A week or so ago, Robert Sharp wrote to me asking me about the quality in children’s drawings that seems impossible to fake. What I wrote back was: It seems to me that children, when they are drawing, are pushing the very edge of their abilities, while adults, when trying to mimic children’s drawings, are holding back somehow.
Lynda Barry had a much more interesting take during her interview on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast. She says it has to do with line, gesture, and the link between drawing and seeing and thinking:
A kid’s drawing isn’t line…. A kid’s drawing is gesture. It’s natural human movement. Another place we see that is in the sciences. If you watch a scientist… watch how they move their hands on the whiteboard when they’re thinking? It’s astonishing… the parallels between how their hands look and how their drawings look and four-year-olds. It’s amazing.
It would make the physicists just cry to show that it looks just like four-year-olds, but the thing that I’ve come to realize is: What if that’s what a line looks like, not just when you’re getting an idea, but that the line itself is giving you an idea. That’s the part people don’t remember or suspect about drawing: That drawing can go, not just from your head to the page, but definitely from the page up your hand and into your head. That’s the kind of drawing that kids are doing. They’re drawing and then seeing what it is that they’re drawing.
(This reminds me of how my son Jules, even now, will add a few lines, then sit back, admire what he’s done, pump his fists in excitement, and then keep adding lines.)
Some chalkboards from my files (though only one scientist):
Top to bottom: Feynman, Beuys, Albers, Beuys, Beuys, Beuys, Basquiat, Haring.
You ever get bored and draw Batman masks on everybody in the New York Times Book Review?
I joked about this on Twitter and @philipkennedy blew my mind with this story:
When producer Michael Uslan was first thinking about how to bring a darker version of Batman to the big screen, back in 1980, he saw a photo of Jack Nicholson from The Shining in the newspaper — and he started drawing on it. Uslan turned Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” face into the Clown Prince of Crime. And, just nine years later, the rest was movie history.
Holy White-Out, Batman!
See also: “Draw a picture of Batman”
Lynda Barry, who we’ve all known was a genius, but is now officially one, posted these images on Instagram from “The Night We All Got Sick,” the first comic in The Greatest of Marlys, with the following caption:
These are the first drawings of Marlys. I didn’t know who she was or that I was about to spend the next 30 years with her. I was just making a comic strip about cousins getting sick after a parade. I didnt know who any of them where when they first showed up that day. And I was on the fence about them, wondering should I keep this drawing or not? It scares me to think how easily I could have thrown her away on this first day because I didn’t like the way she “looked”, because the drawing didn’t please me. I believe drawings have the same right to exist as I do. I’m so glad I kept the drawing. I’m so glad I didn’t throw her out.
“I believe Maryls conjures me as much as I conjure her,” Lynda writes in the book’s introduction. “The portable between her world and mine is a pen line made by the living mystery of this hand, this hand that looks like yours.”
We create our drawings and they create us.
I recently found out that a former professor of mine, Bill Newell, died in April. Here is a caricature of him I doodled in my notebook during his senior seminar, 14 years ago. We weren’t at all close — I learned a lot about him from this lovely obituary, even read a few of his Goodreads reviews — but as the years go by, I respect more and more the education I received at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies that he helped create. For that, I thank him. (How odd it is that we usually only know the value of our educations in hindsight…)
Here’s another doodle, this one by Ric Ocasek, shared by his sons:
Our dad was a prolific doodler. His passing was sudden, unexpected, and beyond heartbreaking. Yesterday, we found this last doodle on his armchair. He couldn’t have known what it would end up meaning to us. We love him so much.
Aside from his great songs with The Cars, Ocasek, in his role as producer, did his own kind of educating. (The word “education” comes from the Latin word educare — “to lead or draw out.”) Just as the educator draws out the best of their students in the classroom, so does the producer draw out the best of musicians in the studio.
I’m thinking about this “drawing out” now, and drawing, and how, even in the roughest doodle, something very human is left behind, the image of the subject, yes, but also the hand of the drawer…
I love copying my kids’ drawings and writings into my diary. Copying seems like a mindless activity when you first start out, but by the time you’ve finished your copy, you usually learn something about the thing you’re copying and/or you discover something of your own.
The first grader wrote this poem last night at the pizza joint. (He and his brother have been watching the poetry episode of Classical Baby and reciting WCW’s “This is Just to Say.”)
While I copied the poem, I noticed how he writes his lowercase a’s and how he forms the letters starting from the bottom. I thought about Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and about how the size of the paper we write on affects what we write. I thought about how quickly kids move towards parody with their own work, and how here I was, again, making a copy of a copy.
When I copied the tablecloth, I noticed that the original pattern could become a skull or some kind of death mask.
When I copied the exploding earth, I wondered what was with the teeth, until I realized they were exploded parts of the poles.
Copying is a way of paying closer attention.
Side note: I find it interesting how whenever I post something “dark” that my kids make, strangers assume that they’re “dark” kids. They’re actually quite cheerful kids… it’s called “imagination,” man!
Yesterday the 4-year-old brought his book of Coco sheet music into the studio and I copied a statue of Ernesto de la Cruz for him to color.
Today he came in and wanted to copy my copy. He had trouble starting, so I drew Ernesto’s head and torso, and he finished up his legs, arms, and guitar. I like our copy of the copy even more:
This happens a lot when I’m drawing solo: I’ll attempt a drawing of something from life, and then if I copy that drawing, simplifying the lines, I get something more reduced and interesting.
Now I’m wondering what a third step would look like. A copy of a copy of a copy…
Related: Copying is how we learn.
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