Of all my hobbies, drawing and painting are the most consistent. I’ve cursed drawing, tried to quit many times, and always come back, because sitting and making pictures is just so engrossing.
But why is it so engrossing? Why is it so easy for me to spend hours doing nothing but drawing? I typically want a break from anything after an hour max, even movies. I could go into many reasons why drawing is different, but one stands out to me: the process of making an artwork is inherently sustainable. It comes with built-in breaks because it’s a sandwich process.
Um… now I have to explain that. Okay, here are the ingredients of the sandwich:
- Creative sections: making choices, solving problems, trying new approaches, thinking about how to represent things visually
- Skilled sections: applying learned skills and knowledge (e.g. anatomy, perspective), patient manual labour, being thorough, following through on your plan
Consider this digital illustration speedpaint by David Revoy:
It follows a fairly typical digital art process, alternating between creative and skilled sections.
- Sketch and composition (creative)
- Line art (skilled)
- Choosing colour scheme (creative)
- Colour blocking and shading (skilled)
- Rendering (creative to add new elements, skilled to fix mistakes and improve the appearance)
Well, you could subdivide it more and more into creative and skilled sections and tasks, but if you’re an artist, you probably know what I am talking about by now…
My point is this. Making creative choices and applying your hard-earned skills are both fun, but doing either for extended periods is not. The nice thing about the typical drawing process is that it forces you to switch back and forth between them. Your brain has some time to relax in between creative efforts, but not so long that it gets terribly bored.
Perhaps I can learn a lesson from this. I designed a webcomic format which eliminates 80% of skilled work from the process and leaves mostly creative choices that need to be made, such as writing dialogue and choosing expressions and stock photos. I thought this would be more sustainable because it takes less time, but I suspect the reason that I haven’t updated the comic in months is because it’s subconsciously not as enjoyable when I’m making those choices non-stop.
I wonder if this can also tell us about the ideal direction of AI art tools. As we know, current AI is very good at being skilled, but not so creative; it is capable of eliminating many skilled sections from the sandwich and leaving the creativity behind. To me, this has always been an exciting idea. I dislike how time-consuming art is - how nice to speed it up. But even if I do want to try out AI models that can create a lineart from my sketch and a rendered image from my coloured lineart, leaving me to only sketch, colour and put the finishing touches, this might actually lead to a more stressful drawing experience.
This is not really a new idea, although it is usually placed in a much more serious context of the automation of industrial labour. I’ve heard that the book ‘Architect or Bee?’ by Mike Cooley dives into this topic and how technology can better serve us generally. You can read about the book here - note the section on CAD in design. I’d like to read it some day.