Austin Kleon

Learning how to learn again

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.

A lot of this way of studying has been inspired by my son, Owen.

Even before I had kids, I wrote, “We learn by copying… Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.” Funny now that I have a four-year-old budding mechanic, who actually spends a great deal of his time copying photos and drawings of cars, taking them apart in his mind and putting them back together on the page to figure out how they work.

What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.) Milton Glaser says that “drawing is thinking.” I think that drawing is learning, too, and one thing Owen has taught me is that it is more valuable as a verb than it is as a noun.

I felt sure that my children would teach me more than I taught them. I was not anticipating that they would actually teach me how to learn again…

Part of a cure

drawing won't help

“When you draw,” says Ed Emberley, “you go away. You go to another place. It’s a safe place. And it’s a real place.”

“A piece of paper is a place,” says Lynda Barry. “The thing you draw with is the way you travel through that place.”

“I make places I want to go to,” says Renee French.

“It’s sublime,” said Maurice Sendak, “to go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character, the blemishes of your personality, whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter.”

In Jules Feiffer’s house when he was growing up, “Everything was a secret. So in order to make my own secrets, to establish my own way out of things I couldn’t understand, [I drew]. And it’s a way of not just escape, but of survival.”

“Drawing is 50,000 years old, isn’t it?” says David Hockney. “I think it comes from very deep within us. When all those people in the 1970s were trying to give up drawing, I did go and see them and they said: ‘Oh, you don’t need to draw now.’ And I did point out: ‘Well, why don’t you tell that to that little child there? Tell them you don’t need to draw and see what happens.’”

“Drawing is my way of explaining to myself what goes on in my mind,” said Saul Steinberg. “It’s not I who makes this drawing.  It’s the hand that drew that makes it.”

“As kids,” Lynda Barry says, “we went to the page to find something, to have an experience. As adults, she says, “we have it backwards.” We think that we need to have an experience before we go to the page.

Cy Twombly: “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”

Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”

“Drawing isn’t work,” says a character in Christophe Blain’s Isaac The Pirate. “It’s a form of prayer.”

ED EMBERLEY’S MAKE A WORLD

ed emberley t-shirt
see it bigger

Here I am modeling my new favorite t-shirt:

Designed by Kyle Fletcher of Mutual Midwest and screen printed by our friends at the one and only Wire&Twine, this 5-color design features every illustration in Ed Emberley’s classic drawing book, “Make a World”. From dump truck to schooner, from forklift to dinosaur, every image is on the shirt.

Go here and buy one to support the production of the upcoming documentary, Ed Emberley’s Make A World: The Film.

Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make A World

I only came to Ed Emberley’s Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World last year, but it’s quickly become the #1 book I recommend to people I meet who say, “I can’t draw.” In it, Ed Emberley shows you how to “make a world” with just a few simple shapes, step-by-step. I love the emphasis on simplicity: if you can draw a triangle, a square, a circle, and a line, you’re good to go.

(Here’s a great little video review of the book by Chris Glass.)

Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make A World Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make A World

Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make A World Ed Emberley's Drawing Book: Make A World

And yeah, I have sat down with the book and copied all the exercises!

emberley-studies-1

emberley-studies-2

See more of my posts about Ed Emberley.

HOW TO DRAW FACES

Shot this little video at lunch on my Iphone and posted it to Twitter. I came up with the little exercise for my Vizthink Viznotes webinar. Folks seemed to dig it, so I’m posting it here.

The Iphone continues to inspire me with possibilities. Ideas spread to a thousand people…instantly.

Instant publication.

The best part of all? It can be quick and dirty. People forgive quality. Heck, they’re probably watching the thing on their phone…so why not shoot it on your phone?

HOW TO DRAW TREES?

tree drawings
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After years of working at a newspaper, my uncle Jeff quit his job to follow his true passion: preaching. My aunt Connie commissioned me to draw him an image of a tree with strong roots for his 50th birthday.

This kind of assignment is rough for me, because I’m not a fine artist. For the kind of drawing and cartooning I practice, drawing isn’t just a drawing, it’s more like picture-writing. It’s about writing with symbols…either conveying some kind of information or telling a story.

The biggest problem was that I was trying to be clever by using a cross for the tree trunk:

tree crosses

I almost drove myself crazy trying to get it to look recognizable.

And so, after endless drafts, I learned a valuable lesson:

Don’t try to be clever. Just draw.

As Faulkner put it, “Kill your darlings.”

I threw the cross idea out the window, and went with what I love to do: tell a story in a series of simple pictures.

tree drawings
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The bonus of all this was that the tree I drew as the “final” in the series turned out to be the best one I came up with:

tree drawing

So Meg and I headed off and got a three-panel frame:

tree drawings
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Voila! A tree triptych.

A couple of days later, I learned another valuable lesson: Do some research.

Had I been more thorough with my Googling, I might have found Bruno Munari’s book, Drawing A Tree:

bruno munari drawing a tree

A tree is a slow explosion of a seed….When drawing a tree, always remember that every branch is more slender than the one that came before. Also note that the trunk splits into two branches, then those branches split in two, then those in two, and so on, and so on, until you have a full tree, be it straight, squiggly, curved up, curved down, or bent sideways by the wind.

You draw, you learn.

See more tree inspiration on my tumblr…

TEABAGGIN’, PART TWO

tea bag + sharpie on index card

For this second batch of tea bag doodles, I merged a little activity I stole from Dave Gray via Bill Keaggy with another activity I stole from Matt Madden’s blog.

Here’s the drill:

steps to tea bag comics

  1. Drop a tea bag randomly onto an index card and let it dry
  2. Draw a grid of panels over the stain
  3. Shop for images in the panels, and riff off those with some doodles and captions to make a mini-narrative

Like I said before: nothing serious, just a fun way to pass a couple minutes and find some ideas.

tea bag + sharpie on index card

tea bag + sharpie on index card

tea bag + sharpie on index card

tea bag + sharpie on index card

tea bag + sharpie on index card

This last card I used to take notes on an article about how language shapes the way we think:

tea bag + sharpie on index card

See the first batch.

TEABAGGIN’: A CUBICLE PASTTIME

kick

Leonardo da Vinci used to suggest that art students “look at any walls spotted with various stains,” so as to “arouse the mind to various inventions.” Sandro Botticelli liked to throw a sponge wet with colored paints against a wall, then search out new landscapes in the resulting splatter.—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

This is a fun little cubicle Rorschach activity that I ripped off of Dave Gray. I found it while reading through Bill Keaggy‘s “100 Pieces of Paper and The Stories Behind Them.”

I switched from coffee to tea at work, so every morning I take an index card and set my tea bag down on it, letting the card soak up the tea. Then, I shop for images on the card, and riff off those with some doodles and captions.

Nothing serious, just fun way to pass a couple minutes and find some ideas. You could probably do it with coffee rings, too. They’d be like little ensos.

sun-men

balloons

emerald-city

monster

meteor-mountain
fat-kid-dancing

Related: Christoph Niemann’s coffee-on-napkin drawings.

WINDSOR MCCAY ON DRAWING

Windsor McCay on cartooning:

“Start drawing and do not stop – draw everything you see, no matter how badly…Every drawing you make is better than the one you made before. Don’t take yourself seriously—nor your drawing. The drawing you think is good to-day may turn out to-morrow to be so badly done you will be ashamed of yourself for showing it yesterday. You should never be satisfied….WORK! WORK! That’s all there is to cartooning.”

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