What am I supposed to do with these awful scribbles? My mind mumbled as I finished my first assignment in my first drawing class at university. I was doing “blind contour” drawing, which is an exercise in which you look at an object and draw its outline (its contour). The catch is that you can’t pick up your pen and you can’t look down at the paper until you’re done (hence the “blind”).
I was an art student so that I could get “good” at drawing, which, at the time, meant that I wanted my drawings to appear lifelike and photorealistic. These blind contours were ugly, disjointed, and crude representations of what I saw in life. Little did I know that this exercise would end up teaching me a lot.
Three years later, as I walked the cobblestone streets of Fribourg, Switzerland during my study abroad, I was instructed to stop at certain points and do blind contour drawings. These drawings were just as bad and ugly as the drawings I had done years before, but this time I knew more about what I was actually doing. This type of drawing is considered a “seeing” exercise. Since you can’t look at the marks you’re making on the page, you’re activating your brain to see the object more intently, and to translate its image through your hand.
It’s a really intriguing way to automatically stylize your drawing, almost like a shortcut to creating abstract art. It also reveals what you saw—what “landmarks” were important to your brain in capturing the essence of the object. However, I think this kind of drawing can also help us in our quest for maintaining our humanity while staying integrated with technology.
Four-Year-Old Values
If you’re lacking creative inspiration, go talk to a four-year-old child about something they’ve created recently. I had the pleasure of listening to one tell me about a gingerbread house she made. It took very little prompting, just a little, “What’s this?” and pointing at some gummy candies scattered in the frosting outside her little house.
“Oh! Those are the people. And this is where they go swimming. And on the roof, they can sit and…”
Even better was once she finished describing the house as was typical—each side of the house had a window or a door she could point out—she kept turning the house and suddenly there were more and more wildly creative things to be seen. She was using her imagination to project things that weren’t there onto her candy-covered house. They were at times ludicrous or impossible, but she was only able to stop riffing, not for lack of new ideas, but for her parents’ insistence that it was time for dinner.
It is so much easier for small children to see things in simple shapes. I’ve noticed that adults tend to be more reluctant to stare at something for a while and go wild with imagination. We’re much more comfortable with labelling some “thing” as that “thing” that it is, and leaving it there. The door is a door. That’s how it is, and therefore, that’s what it must remain.
Blind contours are a way to break that mindset, even if temporarily through the laughter as you look back down at your masterpiece to find out it’s not quite the object you were so intensely scrutinizing. It’s also an accessible form of drawing: there is no skill barrier and the product is not supposed to be beautiful or even “correct.”
When was the last time you were able to unleash your inner four-year-old and just create something with some scribbles, then tell a story about it?
Something More "Practical"
I love a good creative exercise. It can be really fun, but there are rules:
- Don’t judge yourself
- Embrace the messiness and imperfection
Wait a second, those rules kind of remind of most of my therapy sessions!
I think that play is massively under-appreciated in the modern world, and especially the “adult world”—whether at work or with other responsibilities. We may have been socialized out of childlike behaviors like play and imagination, and yet those are critical components of effective work.
Even as a developer—a job that most people view as very science-based, technical, and serious—I can’t survive on analytical thinking alone. Problem-identification can require imagination, tapping into the brain’s ability to consider possibilities: Where might this go wrong? How might this work better? Problem-solving requires creativity, especially when you have no idea how to solve some new problem. You have to be willing to play, because the other option is frustration—I’m looking at you, obscure error; I’ll either keep trying and it will magically work out or I’ll send my keyboard through the window.
So, yes, tapping into your four-year-old’s mindset may actually be super practical. And it keeps getting better!
I stumbled on this gem of a TED talk last week: Want to Give a Great Presentation? Use Ugly Sketches by Martin J. Eppler.
As the title suggests, “ugly sketches,” can actually be really powerful even in the workplace—despite all of the designers cringing at the thought of something so distinct from the Apple-brand knock-off they’ve worked so hard at. Nice graphics have their place, but in this context, ugly sketches can amplify presentations with the goal of collaboration and/or tackling complex topics.
Collaboration
Things that are “beautiful” (think polished or clean graphics) feel finished and untouchable. Just like that vase with the gold leaf inlays and intricate hand-painted designs on a pedestal at a museum, a full-color mock-up of a webpage is something you’ll look at briefly, but won’t interact with. Instead, we’ll skirt around the thing in fear.
If, instead, you present a sketchy representation of your mock-up, people don’t feel so scared of “ruining” it. They’ll feel more able to say, “that’s kind of confusing in that order,” or “what if we connected this part…?”
This is how we get to the root of problems that need to be surfaced and addressed before we go to “production” and have a developer create the new webpage or website. Yes, we still need the polished, beautiful mock-ups, but that should be at the very end. Collaboration works best when you start with it, and having “ugly sketches,” can spark the conversation.
Complexity
Metaphors are really important when explaining complex things. I’ve learned this through many, many failed presentations at work. In all of my voracious learning about the technical details of my field, I lost touch with the fact that no one else cares—and I’ve probably already lost them from the first big word I said (like URL or code).
In the TED Talk, Eppler gave an example of how a boss of his started a complex presentation by providing a quick sketch of a fortress built on sand. It was a visual metaphor that was easier to digest and remember than the 40 slides that Eppler had prepared for the presentation. The metaphor helped people connect to the analysis and understand their findings.
There’s also something much more human about that approach. Drawing is a technology in itself; a form of communication. It’s almost a story, captured in lines and textures, rather than in the shapes we call “letters.” Artists don't have sole claim to drawing—anyone can make an "ugly sketch" and still get the point across.
Humans need stories, not bullet-points and huge data charts. We can handle complicated plots and twists and turns in a story—why not take your complex topic and put it in the form of something we can follow more naturally?
Cyborg Scribbles
Blind contour drawing isn’t the answer to everything, but it is a great way to get comfortable with imperfection, create drawings without worrying about skillset, and get in the mode of visual story-telling.
When we abandon the boring, conventional, stiff methods of communication, choosing instead to engage in play and story, we may find better results from our work (and other venues).
Ironically, those childlike skills are just what we need to reinsert humanity into the world we’ve created with technology. So take every advantage of scribbling! At least for me, it’s been helpful to approach things with a little bit more levity, and less pressure to be perfect.
What do you think?