I’ve been teaching myself to draw again. Drawing is something I’ve wanted to get into several times in my life. I watched a lot of cartoons as a child, but I never felt like I would be able to draw cartoons. I think I maybe first got into it when I started watching anime, and I found an manga drawing guide somewhere on the internet.
It’s interesting to think about – when do I first begin to believe that I’m capable of doing something? I’m pretty sure that I loved and enjoyed books for a long time before it occurred to me that I might someday be able to write books of my own. And even when that possibility occurred to me, it took quite a bit longer for me to get around to saying it, believing it, and working on it. These things can have remarkably high “activation energies”.
Anyway I’ve started and stopped several times over the years. And I suppose the interesting thing is that I’ve become a much better writer along the way. I also taught myself music at some point – I’m not as good a musician as I am a writer, but I would seem pretty decent to somebody with no musical background. I’ve been paid to play live music on several occasions, which is a pretty cool milestone – and something that I think non-musicians might be surprised re: how easy it actually is. Like, I hardly know any music theory. I can’t read music notation. I just… have some junkyard knowledge. But you can get very far in life with junkyard knowledge. I know there are junkyard programmers and junkyard CEOs who are doing very, very well for themselves. You could probably think of folks like Da Vinci as relatively junkyard-y intellectuals. Not sure if he’s the best example. But you get it.
(I’ve started an art Instagram account, @visakanv.art. I remember hesitating with the word “art”. After all, I’m just some guy dicking around, trying to learn, trying to teach myself something. But I decided, fuck it, let’s just do it. We live in crazy times. So what if people call me crazy? Everything else is crazier.)
The thing that I want to talk about is what I call “Chaos School”, or “Chaos Thinking”, or “Chaos Implementation”. I think it’s best demonstrated in the following image, where I’m trying to practice shading:
Each one of these styles of shading can be done to beautiful effect – but as you can see, the chaotic random scribbles is the method that is liveliest. It feels the most “energetic”. I’m not saying it’s the “best” method. It’s just the method that most naturally fits my style. Looking at this again, I realize that my cross-hatching was too uneven – good cross-hatching is actually quite beautiful, but you have to do it quite evenly. Chaos energy on the other hand… while there is an order to the madness, it’s fundamentally madness-friendly. I appreciate that.
And so now I’m thinking about… how else can I embody chaos energy in my life? I’m already doing it with my Twitter. Here’s a thread of pictures of what my Twitter threads look like, when visualized:
It’s the same sort of chaotic, unruly energy. While I can be tidy and structured if necessary – when I was a kid I wrote a couple of video game FAQs that had their paragraphs justified at the character level (meaning that I would switch words out until I got every line to end with all the last characters in a vertical line). And I definitely think there’s value in trying to be precise – here’s an attempt I did to try and teach myself some perspective, which requires precision:
This was my first recent attempt at something like this, and I just freestyled it as quickly as I could. I imagine if I were trying to do it when I was younger, I would’ve made a big deal out of it – I would’ve taken a ruler and maybe tried doing it in pencil first, and then slowly try and get everything perfect, and probably make a “mistake” somewhere – like one of the lines would be smudged or maybe have one little imperfection in it, and it would stand out and upset/annoy me a lot, and I would agonize over it. I’m now getting flashbacks to when I tried to draw Goku from Dragonball Z, and I spent what seemed like days trying to get it right. And I did the same thing with some art from the Diablo 2 instruction booklet.
I was going to call it a mistake – but I the more I think about it, I realize that there was a reason why I was doing it. It was a kind of evasive-avoidant perfectionism. I wanted to try and make one thing perfect from the start, and I didn’t want to accept that my early work was going to be underwhelming. I’ve changed my perspective on this – now I think it’s much more sensible to accept in advance that the early work is always going to be “bad”, or “sloppy” or “underwhelming”. I’m tempted now to find that old picture and do 10 or 20 different sloppy, quick-sketch copies.
These are my attempts to do the surprised/annoyed girlfriend from the Distracted Boyfriend meme – and what I’m proud of here is that I’m willing to attempt really quick-and-dirty sketches that I know in advance aren’t going to be good. And this is part of what I think of as my Chaos School philosophy, and it’s also what I’ve developed from doing these 1000wordvomits. Just do it, do it sloppy, do it over and over again. There are things that you’ll only learn after you’ve made the mistakes. If the mistakes are cheap to make, it makes sense to make as many mistakes as you can as quickly as you can.
I’m wondering, then, how I can apply this to the rest of my life. I think there’s a general belief that as people get older, they get less comfortable making mistakes, more afraid of looking stupid. One of the great things about young children is that they don’t care about looking stupid – they just do whatever they want to do.
I’m of the belief that learning to do gymnastic flips is just like learning to walk, and learning to play a piano concerto is just like learning to touch your nose. It’s just that when you’re young, nobody mocks you for the failures that you make while learning, and you don’t feel bad about screwing up either – you don’t even know to frame things that way yet. You have to learn how to feel bad about yourself, your mistakes and your failures. And I think that can be unlearned. I hope I make more mistakes in my 30s than I did in my 20s. I hope to be sillier, have more fun, take myself less seriously, goof off more, and generally be more comfortable with making mistakes.