Your knowledge shapes you
Starting a new sketchbook
Hi pal!
This week I finished up a sketchbook I’ve been using since 2016. I could write a lot surrounding that one, so I will save that for a future issue and give you a mini-tour through it at the same time.
It usually takes me a couple years to fill a sketchbook. Which means I go through a lot of changes with them. They sort of mark different eras in my life.
This is gonna be the first sketchbook where I’m not enrolled in a school.
Here I was breaking in the first page, just mindless doodling silly creatures. I love to draw with these fat juicy markers to add accent colors, rather than coloring the pages entirely. They do bleed through the paper quite a bit but I don’t mind too much. I also bought a thin, white posca marker so I can add white on top of my colors. Feels like I unlocked a new power. (look at the white strokes in the dogs fur)
I feel so happy when I’m noodling in my sketchbooks and I love to flip through them. I wanna fill a bunch so that I one day have a huge pile to read.
Btw I wrote an essay!
Your knowledge shapes you
When I was a kid I watched cartoons so much I started to find reality unpleasant. Live-action shows made me feel anxious or queasy. People in character costumes or heavy makeup was depressing. Muppets was eerie, it seemed like their skin had been ripped off from a creature, and was worn by a hand. Movie sets was confined and claustrophobic. The real world seemed dull and gray. Movies with flesh and blood actors looked like the people on the news.
But cartoons felt real. They didn’t pretend to be anything more than they were. Cartoons felt like a world that actually existed inside the television. Just like I thought fish belonged in aquariums.
My view on reality was also shaped by cartoons. I had a pseudo-scientific explanation of physics, before I even knew there was such a thing as physics. I thought the outlines of cartoons must somehow also exist in real life. In cartoons they held the colors together, so I thought in our world they must be what holds physical-matter together. I thought outlines were sorta like a plastic bag enveloping everything, which made sure stuff didn’t float around like water in space.
Sometimes I would look really hard at things to try to see the outlines. I thought they must be there, but very thin. I was sure that if I pushed my eye just a tiny bit closer to my knee I should be able to see them. I felt like it confirmed my theory when shadows fell in the right way around contours.
At some point I stopped looking, assuming they must be so thin that I can’t see them with my naked eye.
People try to make sense of reality from the limited information they have. Anything that wasn’t cartoons frustrated me, because it was beyond my understanding. Cartoons was all I knew about. They felt safe. For some people that might be a religion or science. I’m glad I learned some things since then and got used to looking at reality. Otherwise I might have started a religion called “cartoonity.”
Since then my mind has changed quite a bit. I do a lot of game development now so I often joke about the world in terms of level design and graphics. What knowledge shapes you?
Recent Finds
🖊️ Pen - 0.7mm White Posca Marker
This is the white marker I mentioned. It works great drawing on top of colors with it. Doesn’t work as well if you wanna draw on top of black ink.
📝 Article - How Kepler Invented Science Fiction
Kepler was an astronomer with a knack for storytelling. He was a bit ahead of his time though, which ended up with his mom being accused of being a witch. Pretty gripping story and interesting to hear about the origins of science fiction.
🔴 Youtube video - Draw the same thing every day
This is seriously one of the most liberating drawing tips I’ve ever heard. When had I to illustrate something in the past, such as a cover for an essay, so much of my time was spent thinking about what type of character to put in what situation. Now I’ve decided that I’m just gonna draw hairy lizards. Now I don’t have to think about that part of the question anymore. Saves some mental energy for the important part - how to communicate what I want to say.
(the character in todays illustration is a hairy lizard)
As always, thank you for reading! See you next week!
And thank you to Arman Khodadoost and Leo Ariel for the feedback on todays essay!
(ps. what knowledge shapes you?)
"Muppets was eerie, it seemed like their skin had been ripped off from a creature, and was worn by a hand." LOLOL Jonas 😂
Loved hearing your take on cartoons!
That illustration for the essay is sick! - in the good way of course.
Regarding what knowledge shapes me, I spend a lot of time thinking about poetry as a medium. Because of this, I'm naturally pretty good at finding puns, obscure connections or other "poetic elements" in everyday conversations; at times I feel like it helps me punctuate conversations that were already about to reach their natural conclusions - or to just introduce something unexpected out of silence. What it really is, I think, is a great big, open "osmosis" of everything inside me - and from that fog, things take shape.
Like in a nebula.