Here’s my latest work in Inkscape. (If you look at the author information, you’ll see that I just added color to an existing diagram of the brachial plexus on the wikimedia commons, but that didn’t stop it from taking about 4 hours of effort.) The full size image looks much better, so I recommend you click on it to view it.
I was a terrible art student in school. I don’t think it was for lack of motivation–I consider 2d art to be one of the more practical and valuable skills one can have. You could go back through my class notes and identify phases of my life in which I had regained the motivation to learn to draw. But I just could never get anything to look half-decent, no matter how hard I tried.
Part of the problem, I feel, is the constraints that the physical media place on the would-be artist. A paint-stroke, once made, is rather permanent. Pencil or charcoal can be rubbed away to a greater extent, but in neither case can they ever fully be undone. As a débutante artist, it was one thing to get a good start on a project, but the missteps tended to accumulate.
Then, of course, there are graphics programs ranging from MS Paint to Photoshop in which a fully “Undo” actually is possible. With these, the quantum–the indivisible step–is the stroke. You can make a stroke, undo, make a stroke, and undo ad infinitum, but you are still working under a sort of guess and check system. You must still have the ability to make that one full, perfect (or acceptable) stroke before you can move on to the next. What’s more, once you’ve made the stroke and moved on, your ability to go back and change it later is rather limited.
I consider these two very small projects that I’ve completed with Inkscape the best 2d art I have ever done. Obviously they’re incredibly modest; there are more impressive feats than tracing a logo and coloring in a diagram. But for what they are, they’re the closest to professional quality that I have ever come.
I owe this to the Inkscape/vector graphics drawing paradigm. In vector graphics, every item in an image is saved as an item. Curves are curves, lines are lines, gradients are gradients. Nothing is reduced to pixels.[1] This is what allows you to zoom in infinitely on an angle in an svg image and always see a crisp apex rather than a pixelated blur. It also means that instead of the stroke-undo-stroke-undo process I used when I was in 8th grade, I can make on stroke and then adjust its curvature, width, color, etc at any point after it’s made.
I think there is a very strong parallel between my experience and the experience of autistic children working with Google Sketch-Up. To summarize the video in the link (which you should really really watch–it’s also embedded below), children on the autism spectrum were asked to draw floor plans of their rooms. Each found the process extremely difficult and produced a very poor drawings. Then each was asked to make a 3d model of his/her dream house using Sketch-Up, and they easily produced some really incredible models. In both cases, it’s not that the students (myself and the children on the autism spectrum… although maybe I should be including myself in the later group) were not creative, our minds are simply not able to adapt to the paradigms imposed by the constraints of physical media.
This post is inspired in part by a conversation I had last night with a former teacher of mine about the balance of art and other subjects in school. Prior to my experience with Inkscape, I probably would have argued much more vehemently that students who are more interested in other subjects (e.g. computer science) should be allowed to pursue those interests in lieu of art—especially in lieu of traditional visual arts (theatre and performance not included), which I believe I would have continued to be a maddeningly frustrating waste of my time, no matter how many years I was forced to work on them.
However, now I am much more inclined to believe that everyone should be required to explore the artistic world, but that the primary job of early artistic education should be to help students find a paradigm that works for them. As it was when left-handed students were forced to learn to write with their right hands, it seems like it would be a tragedy to force a student to draw with a pencil in paper if he is so naturally inclined to a different, but equally valid, creative mode–not to mention the frustration and shame that such an effort would also entail.
[1] I like to think of an svg as a sort of platonic ideal of its raster counterpart.
7 Comments
does comment thing work?
cool, it does.
oooo, im commenting.
i think all might agree you’ve lost your privilege to speak of art in any context. in addition, one of my family members happens to fall within the ‘spectrum’ and was beyond insulted. upon reading your ignorant remarks she began feverishly drawing anything she could find in front of her. in short, her attempts left her prostrate on the floor, reduced to tears. you know very little about a lot.
Yes, because you are the Arbiter of Art.
…And the Decider of how autistic people think. (Though you seem to be in direct contradiction with the linked video, so hmmm.)
Also, I think you completely missed the point of that paragraph!
Creativity is not synonymous with APPEARING to have constructed something through the use of an interface designed by subjective opinions which, to no fault of their own, are only capable of conceptualizing limited design criteria based upon very broadly abstracted tasks they must ASSUME users will be attempting. These individual tools under the larger umbrella of the sketch-up “toolness” (that is, sketch-up as a tool itself – adding a second order to their lack of ability to accommodate specificity) are comprised of the generalized applications that brutally cover a set of more nuanced tasks, ironically granting them the success they APPEAR to exhibit because they only allow the user to operate within bounded creativity (problem solving within the parameters of a limited interface). This inverts the user – tool relationship in that the interface begins to heavily influence and determine the output of the user’s ideas which violates the authenticity of original intent.
If you now feel inclined to make the desperate argument that a pencil is also a tool then you would technically be correct. However, with the pencil it is obvious that the intent-to-externalization discrepancy has the potential to be far less severe, it will gladly record the visceral process of one’s externalization that should otherwise (according to your logic) be crudely forced through, and violated by, something similar to the lens of detached sketch-up semiotics. Furthermore, a simple pencil has the ability to facilitate the creation of an infinite number of marks where sketch-up is limited by its finite compartmentalized organization of supposedly relevant tools that only APPEAR to draw, for example, a circle [of which the default number of lines that define its shape in the software is inadequately 12, meaning that it is not a circle at all but actually a dodecagon (as it is not vector-based like many of its competitors - a problem even you identified in another interface)].
In endorsement of this approach you have both falsely implanted the idea of creative confidence decided by your very subjective notion of what constitutes a successful externalization (or graphic portrayal) of ones ideas, but also trivialized the creative process of those that reside somewhere along this ridiculously titled “spectrum” by comparing it to your own experiences. This is especially bothering because you patronizingly feel as though you have somehow graced us with your childish revelation and alleviated the supposed autistic situation that you rhetorically identify as some enormous intellectual problem when you failed to realize that by suggesting a new and more irrelevant tool (requiring a knowledge of not only individual sketch-up tools but also sketch up at large, an operating system that supports it, and the hardware/computer/vehicle that delivers it, you have effectively done what you initially criticized by forcing a left-handed student to use their right, so to speak.
Are pencils even necessary? Did it occur to you that the output generated by an “occupier of the spectrum” could be meaningful to that individual, something they may take ownership of, and develop over time? Have you considered that perhaps most people are struggling with this superficial idea of conventional representation? Should you proceed in a direction that caters to this presupposed idea of valid representation or support activity of individuals who would prefer an alternative method to, but in no way less valid than, your own? Have you thought about the possibility that the question of a “dream house” alone may be grossly inappropriate, especially in conjunction with the advocacy of a tool that does an excellent job of creating rectilinear forms in which threshold becomes implicit (a spatial condition many autistic children do not enjoy)? Have you thought about whether or not these autistic children were responding positively to the creation of these simple forms because they associated them with “normal” dwelling iconography which they understood the evaluator of this demeaning process would be satisfied with? Do you know for a fact that they were not simply enthralled by the newness and whimsy of the modeling software as opposed to being satisfied with its abilities to facilitate their creativity? Did you think about the fact that the video, to which you or someone else smugly referred, that I supposedly contradicted, was produced by the people that manufacture the software? Do you realize that if it is actually a spectrum it means that you’re either autistic or those on the spectrum are not on a spectrum and just different people because of the continuum it implies? Have you thought about this shame as being inflected by your own modes of though and merely imposed upon these individuals because of the irrelevant standards you’ve applied to their unique individuality? “Hey, Marshall, go build a bird’s nest like a bird would.” (Marshall comes back with a birdhouse made out of pine boards.)
Thanks for the vote and comment on the GOOD contest, Nancy. Coming from you, it means a lot.
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