When I was a kid, I enjoyed drawing. Around holiday times especially, or for birthday cards, I would get out the Ed Emberly books and draw little worlds of snowmen and haunted houses.
At my friend's house, his mom would unfurl a giant roll of newsprint and we would draw "creature castles" in which various little stick figure monsters would attack and defend castles from each other.
When I came across the book Open Circuits I thought, wow those are beautiful. And the more I learned about electronics the more I saw beauty in this miniature world, and in our attempts to represent it as well, as in this vintage Westinghouse chart of the electro magnetic spectrum.
This inspired in me a desire to be able to create such drawings myself, and I set myself a goal of being able to draw a passable diagram (in a sort of retro, not overly realistic fashion) of a resistor, using a wacom tablet and the illustration software Krita.
I would have a daily practice routine, and follow some online guides and videos I had come across. I would stick with it for at least a month. And I would record my work to be able to observe my progress.
I began with circles, overlapping and nested. This is what they said I should do, I should master the circle.
The circles never got much better than this.
Next they said you can also practice drawing spoons.
These are more like the rough suggestion of a spoon I guess. Look at the one in the top-left, it's so bad. Vertical lines are hard. At this point I was feeling pretty discouraged with my "progress" but I was only a few days into the 30 days I told myself I would try this for, so I couldn't give up yet.
This one is from several days later (more practice in bewteen, I'm not showing all my work).
Okay I've been practicing for an hour a day now for a couple weeks, let's take a crack at the ultimate goal, a sort of retro looking resistor.
There are some stupid faces in the lower right. I actually think that screwdriver isn't too terrible. But the resistor, it looks so bad. That white spot that's supposed to be a reflection is all wrong, I can't even say why. Maybe if I could say why I could make it better. Is it too small? Too sharp? It's like a turd in the middle of a freshly cleaned floor. It looks like the skin-covered eyeball of a newborn rodent. It mocks me.
What the fuck is this gradient bullshit? Is it a top hat? I don't even remember.
My ovals are not bad here, because I go over them again and again, this sort of fools me into thinking they are okay. I am beginning to suspect that this entire effort is a prolonged exercise in denial. I am practicing my ability to be blind to my inevitable failure, rather than practicing drawing.
The circles in the top left are hard to see, but they are just as bad as the circles on day 1. I am making them faint, barely visible, to hide my shame.
In this one I am attempting to draw a piece of origami that was made for me.
The lines are not horrible, so I must have cheated and used the line tool.
I have given up my goal for now. Sometimes in my hours of weakness I contemplate trying to use AI to generate the images that I want, but I think that would be even sadder than not having them at all.
There is some comfort in having made an honest effort and failed.
But did I really make an honest effort? Was it unrealistic to expect to be able to draw better than a drunk 7 year old after only one month of practice?
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