Avian’s Blog

I have in front of me two sketchbooks. Between them, they contain around a hundred pages and a bundle of loose sheets. Thumbing through them, they start with embarrassingly clumsy pencil sketches, half way through change to line marker drawings and end with digitally shaded print-outs. The first page is dated April 2013. A year and a half later, I'm trying to come up with a reasonable story behind all of this.

The fact is that free-hand drawing is one skill I never really learned. I am pretty handy with a pencil, mind you. I am old enough to have had technical drawing lessons in school that did not involve anything fancier than a compass and a straightedge. I do majority of my notes in a paper notebook and still prefer to do plans and schematics for my home projects with a pen instead of a mouse. However the way one draws objects that do not consist of right angles and straight lines has always eluded me.

Drawing is really hard.

-- Randal Munroe in an recent interview

I have grown up with characters drawn by Miki Muster and I have kept my appetite for comics ever since. I don't think I ever attempted to draw one though. I remember the art class I attended in elementary school. It seems the local artist that held it considered it his job to protect our unspoiled childhood creativity. Any art inspired by popular culture was frowned upon and a reason for a lecture on how completely devoid of imagination our generation was. I guess we stuck to whatever kind of imaginary things children were supposed to draw back then and I was more interested in the room full of ZX Spectrums next door anyway.

So from that point of view, attempting to draw cartoon characters has been an interesting new challenge, something very different from my usual pursuits. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that I picked up something like that now. I have been writing software at home while studying electronics at the Faculty and I have been doing electronics at home while writing software at work. These days I spend most of my time doing everything from electronics design, software development to writing and giving talks for the Institute. It leaves little space to decompress after work. Doing some non-digital creativity is refreshing.

The other part of this story is, of course, that I've been spending increasing amounts of time on forums and events that have something to do with cartoonish horses and other such things. For better or for worse, it's been a common pass time and means of escape for me this past year. I certainly wouldn't go out and buy a sketch book and a set of pencils if I wouldn't witness a few people from science and engineering professions try themselves in drawing, sometimes with really nice results. It seems that whatever community I happen to meet, I can't manage to stay just a passive observer for long.

If nothing else, that teacher from elementary school was probably right regarding lack of imagination. I don't pretend that what I've made is very original nor that I've managed to teach myself anything else than basics. On the other hand, learning anything necessarily involves some degree of copying. I don't feel this has been a waste even if there is a crowd on the Internet is doing similar things.

The point is that to be truly adept at designing something, you have to understand how it works. [Otherwise] you're drawing ponies. Don't draw ponies.

-- David Kadavy in Design for Hackers

Several years and two schools after that art class I mentioned, I found myself at an art history lecture. It was taught by a bitter old lady who, despite her quite obvious disappointment at the world, was still very much determined to teach us ignorant youth. In addition to explaining historic European architecture styles to us, she also commonly managed to slip in her observations about life in general. On one such occasion she told us how often men fall into the trap of irrationally obsessing over one thing. I remember duly noting it in my notebook.

Maybe this is what she had in mind, maybe not. The fact is that I enjoyed doing it and learning to draw made me look at things around me in new ways. If someone else liked the few results that I shared on the Internet, that much better. Some say it might look terribly silly a few years on, but I'm sure I won't regret gaining a new skill.