If you didn’t know, I work in my church’s nursery with 1-4 year olds. It is in this nursery that I find one of my biggest issues growing within me whenever we color.
I have this tendency to allow kids to draw… outside of the lines. I know, I know. How dare I challenge the very lesson that has developed kids like me into such fine, upstanding citizens. Decades of teaching has gone into this method of curving a child’s scribbling into the fine art of coloring in someone else’s artwork.
I don’t want the kids to color in the lines. I feel it’s inhibitive to their creative process. Have you ever looked at scribbling and thought to yourself, I’ll never be able to do that. You should try it. Go grab a piece of paper and try, just try, to scribble like a 2 or 3 year old.
You can’t. Your brain forces everything, even your scribbling into a series of coherent lines. A child can scribble in all different directions, but I’ll bet yours looks either like a bunch of connected lines because you went back and forth, or a bunch of circles. It’s okay. You just can’t do it.
I’ve noticed a pattern in my life where I like to learn the process of what I like doing. I really enjoyed making comics as a kid. So, I made them. After a while, I decided to look up how “the pros” did it. Turned out, many of them had a process called inking. So, I went out to the local art store and asked what I was supposed to get, and came home with an inking pen, and an ink well. This was unpleasant, delicate, and hard. I wasn’t good at inking, but that’s what the professionals did… so I stopped drawing comics. It was no longer a fun endeavor doing something that I enjoyed, but a chore to make something that was acceptable and just like everything else.
I started making movies with my friends. Stupid movies. Creative movies. We had fun. So, I thought, I wonder how the pros do it, and I went to film school. My friends stopped wanting to make movies with me because I wanted it to be perfect and just like everything else.
I like writing. I wrote a book, was excited and self-published. So, I thought, I should learn how the pros do it so I can get published “for real*”. I found a critique group. Learned all about how my little self-published book is basically garbage in the eyes of a “real” editor. My writing became more labored as I tried to make sure I was following the rules so that I almost completely stopped writing.
Now, I’m not saying that everything that we do should be fun or even 100% enjoyable at all times, but when you’re trying to match what other people are doing, to copy them, to be accepted as the same thing, you’re throwing originality and creativity and fun out the window. Granted, success will feel great, but at what cost?
At what point do you stop learning all the rules and just write/draw/create? Should you learn all the rules, and then feel free to break them? Or, do you avoid learning “what the pros do” and break the rules unknowingly, but write/draw/create more product than anyone following the rules?
Try scribbling again. Now that I’ve told you how you’re going to scribble, you’ll likely take more time to try and avoid the very things I said you’d draw, but now you’re just avoiding what you’ve learned. Trying is the problem. You know that you’re supposed to draw shapes and animals and things.
And it’s not the same.
If you’re on Facebook, maybe you already knew about this, but it’s totally Doppleganger Month on Facebook. In this celebration, you find a celebrity (or a non-celebrity) that looks like you and make it your profile picture. I’m happy to do this.
