Mysterious Flame

Drawing constantly is something I just can’t emphasize enough, since it is so fundamental to all visual art, no matter what your primary discipline is. It doesn’t matter if you paint or sculpt or create architecture, you have to be able to draw at some point. There are a lot of benefits to drawing whenever you get the chance.

It helps you visualize your outcomes and solve problems in advance

Michelangelo was known to keep sketchbooks and make drawings constantly. Using various materials, he sketched not just possibilities for works in progress, but studies of anatomy and drapery that helped him create stronger artworks. He sketched out different ideas, worked out problems. For his sculptures, he would start with a sketch, then create a wax miniature of the big piece, and only when he was happy with that would he even touch a block marble. Drawing helped him work out the kinks and visualize what he was going to carve.

I know how useful this is from personal experience. I’ll never forget one painting I did in college where I didn’t do much of a preparatory drawing for a knife painting of a still life. I hastily did the preliminary drawing on the Masonite, planning to correct my drawing mistakes as I painted. I quickly realized this was a mistake, since the errors were never corrected due to my laziness and lack of planning. The finished painting didn’t have very good structure and looked sloppy. Since then, I’ve always made tight drawings for my paintings, even if my brushwork is loose. It really goes back to the old proverb, “Measure twice and cut once.”

It keeps you visually articulate

Sure, drawing is good for preparation. But it also keeps you visually articulate. What do I mean by that? Well, drawing is a language and a skill. If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you know that it requires at least a bit of maintenance. You may be able to pick it back up again, but it gets rusty if you don’t use it. You lose your vocabulary. Drawing constantly ensures that you keep and expand that vocabulary. Especially if you keep trying new things like using a different medium or approach.

Drawing keeps you visually aware

Artists have a tendency to notice and see things that other people don’t, such as shadows, textures, juxtapositions. When you draw constantly, you’ll continue to increase and enhance that ability to see and notice things. People who draw all the time are more likely to find more interesting forms and patterns just from actively practicing this “visual awareness.” Take, for example, the sketchbook of Portuguese artist L Filipe dos Santos, recently featured on Koi Koi Koi. He makes Rorshach like inkblots between sketchbook pages, then draws something into/over it.

Drawing keeps you in top form.

An athlete does stretches and small exercises every day in addition to his main training. In fact, he does it as part of his main training. A marathoner does upper body workouts and lifts weights even though his main goal is to run long distances. It keeps him balanced. It wouldn’t make sense to only exercise his legs, would it? Well, drawing stretches your “artist muscles” and keeps them in shape, regardless of your creative discipline. It keeps your mind, eyes, and hand(s) sharp and responsive. Your eye-hand coordination improves and stays sharp. You maintain that visual vocabulary just by virtue of using and exercising it.

Capture your ideas before they disappear

When you draw constantly, you’ll catch ideas before they go away. Get in the habit of carrying some sort of capture device, whether it’s a Strathmore sketchbook or a digital voice recorder, so that your ideas don’t disappear into the void, forgotten.

Document how an idea develops or progresses

Drawings can document the progression of your ideas. They can educate your patrons about how you do your work. (And thus your sketchbook can become a good marketing tool.) I’ve shown works in progress on my blog, and they fascinate people who aren’t familiar with the process of art creation. Seeing the development of a work of art fascinates other artists, too, since they like to see how other artists think and work. It satisfies that professional (and very human) curiosity of “How did they do that? What can I learn from this, and apply it to my own work?” Picasso’s Les Demoisells d’Avignon was preceded by over 700 preparatory sketches, according to the BBC show The Private Life Of A Masterpiece. (Episode Synopsis) It’s always interesting to see a piece evolve from an idea seed into a finished product. Who knows? Maybe these evolutionary sketches will make their way into your retrospective book someday.

Summary

So, in summary, drawing constantly (how often is up to you) is an essential habit, whatever your discipline. My suggestion? Try to draw every day, and carry a sketchbook and pen or pencil with you everywhere you go.

About a year ago, the rookie designer in our office asked me how I am able to blaze through the Adobe CS3 apps with keyboard shortcuts. She wanted a list of the keyboard shortcuts so she could start learning them herself. I think I had just launched this site, and thought such a thing might be nice here. So, I started jotting down shortcuts on a 3x5 index card, and perused the web for other keyboard shortcut lists, but never really found what I was looking for. Everything had too much information or was too hard to read, or used someone else’s custom shortcuts. I was starting to give up. The project stalled.

Fast forward to late this summer. I discovered that all the Adobe CS3 apps allow you to export your shortcuts to a file (plaintext or html, depending on the app in question). Bingo! I simply exported the default keyboard shortcuts, pulled them into InDesign files, formatted the information nicely, and exported that to PDFs.

After sharing those files on the work.life.creativity. forums, I condensed them down so that they only showed the items that had actual shortcuts assigned. There are a LOT of possible commands in each program, and comparatively few come with keyboard shortcuts out of the box. Most of the most-often used ones are mnemonic, so that helps. (Pressing “P” gives you the Pen tool.) The ones that aren’t just have to be committed to memory.

The Default Cheat Sheets

• Adobe Illustrator CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• Adobe InDesign CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)

You Can Roll Your Own

Here’s the great part of it all: it’s easy to customize keyboard shortcuts to your liking. Delete the ones you don’t use, reassign those to commands you use more frequently or make sense to you. (I’d avoid changing the basic ones like Save, Close, etc. from the OS defaults.) Simply choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and start modifying the ones you want to change. I recommend saving them to a unique name so you can come back to your own setup if your settings get reset. (It happens sometimes when the auto-updater runs.) Once you get your shorcuts set up, you can make your own cheat sheet.

Memorize the shortcuts you use the most. Next time you go through the menus looking for a command, look for the keyboard shortcut next to it, and commit it to memory. First, learn all the basic commands (Save, Close, Quit, etc.). Then learn the tool shortcuts. Get to where you have one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse, avoiding mousing through to the menus. Build that muscle memory! So commit those shortcuts to memory, and make them work for you.

For a long time, Photoshop used Command-Z as “Undo” and Command-Shift-Z as “Redo.” A few years ago, for reasons unknown to me, they changed Undo/Redo to the same shortcut, which forces you to resort to scroll through the History palette to get your documents back to a future state. It takes too long to mouse over to the history palette (if I don’t have to hunt for it first since it might be collapsed or hiding behind something else) and click, click, click to find the document state I’m trying to get back to. This for me is unacceptable and unintuitive, and interrupts my flow of thinking. Plus, it’s inconsistent with the other design apps I’m accustomed to using.

So for every fresh install of Photoshop I work with, I always change “Step Backward” to Cmd-Z and “Step Forward” to Cmd-Shift-Z. Now Photoshop appears to Undo/Redo in the same fashion as everything else does.

It is essential to ask yourself this sort of question, whether you are doing knowledge work or physical labor. Knowledge workers don’t often immediately create a physical product as a result of manual labor. Rather, their work is more “virtual.” Physical work generally results in something tangible. They both deliver something. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Knowing what you are delivering lets you know when you are done.

Some simplified examples of professionals and their deliverables:

• Auto-body Mechanic/Technician - a fixed axle on a car, returned to the customer
• Web Developer - optimized, valid (x)html files, uploaded to the server
• Print Designer - high-res CMYK PDF, sent to printer
• Marketing Coordinator - bulleted list of marketing mix strategy for next year
• Novelist - 300 pages of manuscript

Now, art is a weird hybrid between manual labor and knowledge work. You can end up with a physical object like a sculpture. Or you can create something abstract like a song, experienced in the moment and described even more abstractly with coded marks on paper. Often enough, though, the final result reaches physical form somehow. The end product for poetry is likely to be some sort of bound volume with those poems in print. And music? Well, it can come in the form of a compact disc, a digital download, or a concert with concert-goers clapping their hands enthusiastically.

If you’re still with me, I realize you may be saying, “All right, Captian Obvious, it’s pretty plain that a painter will end up with a painting and a novelist will end up with a novel.” Right. But this kind of thinking will help you focus on your end product and not get sidetracked, as we artists are wont to do.

The bottom line is, this is outcome-based thinking. It helps you know when you’ve reached your goal because you were specific about it. You have created the promised deliverable, whether that promise was to yourself or someone else.

I mentioned earlier that I had been thinking of redesigning the site and moving it from Drupal, which was overkill. Initially I imagined it would be something of a community with a forum and everything, but the forum never really got off the ground. I have to admit, I probably went about it the wrong way, since I didn’t “seed” it with interesting, specific topics. I didn’t really publicize it, either. So I decided to do without it.

Design-wise, the colors have remained the same, but the grid system has changed a bit. The grid was largely inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction.com and based on the 960 Grid System, so it’s very modular. As a designer I’ve finally come to love the grid and gain a better understanding of it’s potential and how to use it. I’ve also come to a greater appreciation for Helvetica, which is used pretty much everywhere except for the body type.