Drawing & Sketching

Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear. This is a lamentation for lost tools and a quiet manifesto describing our desire for slowness. We write not in opposition to computers—in fact we are in the midst of bringing them into our studio—but rather it is a discussion about the importance of slowness. We write in support of slowness.

The interplay between mathematics, simulations, and aesthetics are the primary strands that connect the many different mediums that James has explored his career. His interests in programming and art naturally coalesced around generative art, and the introduction of a physical medium in plotter art captured his full attention. He now dedicates his time creating algorithmic artwork for plotters and 3D simulations. [Bio]

Minimator is a minimalist graphical editor.

All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.

People are alive -- they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond... if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life -- artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation. Everything we draw should be alive by default.

Part 1 talks about the potential of the computer as a new visual art medium. I show a collaboration between art and artist, with the art behaving through simulation, the artist behaving through performance, and the two of them working together, responding to each other.

Part 2 demonstrates a tool for "programming" how art should behave and respond. The artist directly manipulates art objects on the canvas, the way that visual art has always been created since the time of cave paintings. The tool is based around direct, geometric construction rather than indirect, algebraic "code".

Ultimately I’m less interested in Bush Tower and Gilbert’s impression of Bush Tower than am in this sketch. [Gilbert] used a blunt line – probably just a soft pencil – and made little effort to capture detail of the building, but as soon as I saw the sketch I knew which building it was, as clearly as if he had taken a photograph. I’m impressed by this in part because I can’t do it. I can make an engineering diagram – a load-path sketch, for example – just fine and I can draft in CAD. My handwriting has deteriorated because I’ve almost entirely switched from writing to typing, but my sketch line-work is okay. But I can’t draw any better than the average random person on the street, so his ability to so readily capture the essence of a building floors me.

A few of Cosgrave’s illustrations for Saint Exupery’s 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars.

In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:

“Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”

This 1900 map of Manhattan looks, at first glance to be simply another detailed map with building outlines shown. But there’s a surprise when you zoom in: The buildings are little isometric drawings rather than just outlines.

The lost art of drawing for engineers and architects.

Towards the middle of the 12th century, a Scottish theologian named Richard moved across the Channel to Paris and to the Abbey of Saint Victor.

...Richard’s drawings are like nothing made before. They are precocious in pointing to a masterful visualisation of space long before the language of architectural drawing was systematised. Richard used recent developments in geometry to fully articulate the relationship between the plans and elevations: in fact, the drawings represent the beginning of architectural abstraction in the West, not because he uses plans and elevations, but because he uses them together to give readers a real sense of the buildings’ three dimensions. As far as we know, no one in Europe had done this previously.

Repetition has a bad reputation. Doing the same thing over and over every day conjures images of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill.

But as Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Or as Prince put it, “There’s joy in repetition.”

1. You draw one single line. It can be as long as you like.
2. To start the line, you put your pen down.
3. You can make right-angle turns only, either 90 degrees or -90 degrees.
4. You cannot back up. You must always move forward.
5. You don’t lift your pen until you’re ready to stop. When you lift the pen, the doodle is done.

Replace your notebooks and printouts with the only tablet that feels like paper.

I work with my Remarkable template right next to my laptop screen every day. It functions a lot like a second screen - except getting things onto my tablet is a slightly slow process. What if there was a “second screen mode” that could be a combination of live-data and note taking?

Any time you have a big built-up section, the question arises of how to actually assemble it. That’s shop work, so it was a bit easier than field riveting, but it’s quite easy to draw something that can’t physically be built.

It’s a long angled reach to the center-web connection, and it’s a tight fit to the side web connection because of those protruding steel angles. I expect the shop drawings had notes about sequencing to prevent – and I say this with absolutely no experience of having done so – having to take your IKEA furniture apart because you put a piece in wrong and can’t finish assembly.

For a few weeks in the Spring of 2024, readers took turns tracing the previous person’s drawing to make a flipbook-style animation. The result was 22,454 drawings.

When I was a product designer, people would ask what I did for a living, and sometimes I’d answer “I draw pictures of websites.”

Sure, I could just say “I design websites.” That’s true. The end result of my work is (hopefully) that a website looks better, works better, or results in better outcomes.

But most of my day isn’t spent looking at the website, or working on the code of the website, or manipulating the website directly in some way. It’s spent in Figma or Sketch, drawing pictures of how I think the website should look and work.

Through some kind of alchemy, the pictures I draw have an impact on the finished website. But they’re not all the same.

Your daily reminder that it’s OK for first drafts of anything to be rough around the edges, like this original concept sketch for the facehugger in “Alien,” drawn by screenwriter Dan O’Bannon.

With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.

When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.

Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.

And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.

The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.

Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’

The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.

As I drew my first still-life, my instructor noticed I focused on perfecting a section of the composition before approaching other areas of the scene. She pointed out how the drawing would become out of proportion if I continued.

...I worked and reworked the drawing, visually connecting the parts of the composition until it matched the scene.

About half-way through my drawing, I realized I had detached myself from what the objects depicted. The vase was no longer a vase; the bench was no longer a bench; the flowers were no longer flowers. The elements of the scene were all one, a single composition of reflected light, shadows, and darkness.

The approach I learned that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. I apply it in my art and design as well as how I think, write, and make sense of things.

It taught me to step back to see the whole and appreciate its connections before digging into the details.

Just as my lovely professors has said, knowing how to wireframe or mockup in a particular tool 100% did not matter. In fact, all the projects I had done in those tools I didn’t particularly like. Despite all my effort, they ended up looking templated with little new or interesting thinking. I didn’t even use them in my interviews. I had spent a lot of time wrangling the tools to bend to my will and while doing that, sucking up my time for letting my imagination run wild, to play, explore, and make new and in the end, I didn’t find the “me” in any of them. That’s when I decided that if I couldn’t do my job with pen and paper (or whiteboard and marker), then I wasn’t a very good designer. To this day, I find the sentiment to be at my advantage.

Paper clips have also served as objects of more inwardly directed aggression by providing something for the fingers to twist grotesquely out of shape during phone calls, interviews, and meetings. This tactile form of doodling may consume only a fraction of the twenty billion paper clips produced each year, but it underscores the almost limitless functions to which a single form can lead.

How do you work?

When I get home, I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.

Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows:

Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five.

Our desire to continue to use the tools of the hand, even as we may begin to use the computer, has to do with their connection to our bodies. Buildings are still constructed with hands, and it seems that the hand still knows best what the hand is capable of doing. As our hands move, we have the time to think and to observe our actions. We draw using pencil and ink, on mylar and on vellum. When we make changes, they occur with effort and a fair amount of tedious scrubbing with erasers, erasing shields, and spit. We have to sift back through previous drawings and bring them to agreement. So, decisions are made slowly, after thoughtful investigation, because they are a commitment that has consequence. It is better to be slow.

An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.

The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designer’s thinking processes, and provides some ‘talk-back’. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.

Among the best woodblock prints are many that seem not to have adhered strictly to the preliminary sketch. The sketch simply indicated a general direction, and in many cases was not used at all. Or it was even improved upon in the process of carving and brought vividly to life; the woodblock qualities of the print were accentuated and highlighted.

Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the fact that I didn’t sit them in front of a whiteboard, put a pen in their hand, and tell them to draw their argument back to me.

...I reckon the vast majority of design and product problems cannot be solved in a nicely typeset document or simply, calmly talking things out. You need to draw the mess. To share and build complex ideas you need to shape them visually, at lo-fidelity, and have someone poke at every part of it.

4.2 gigabytes.

That’s the size of the model that has made this recent explosion possible. 4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.

...There is already much talk about practical uses. Malicious uses. Downplaying. Up playing. Biases. Monetization. Democratization - which is really just monetization with a more marketable name.

I’m not trying to get into any of that here. I’m just thinking about those 4.2 gigabytes. How small it seems, in today’s terms. Such a little bundle that holds so much.

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The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.

Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.

In a way the very undidactic nature of my Grundkurs is a reaction to that fascinatingly unbearable set of instructions on how to design square and circular pillars, square and circular houses, square and circular squares, square and circular cities. While I cannot subscribe to the idea of a wholesale theory of architecture, starting with pillars and ending with regional planning, I do admire Krier's courage and I have certainly been inspired by the narrative potential of his sketches. Probably also the deliberately ugly, punk tone of some of my drawings is a reaction to Krier's, although I shouldn't blame others for the way I draw, as I don't know how to do it any differently.

Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not.

Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.

A mind so in flux, so sensitive to intuitive insights, could never write an academic textbook. All he could retain on paper were indications, hints, allusions, like the delicate color dots and line plays on his pictures.