Category: Techniques

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Using colours

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My daughter likes drawing. We brought her colored pencils, markers, crayons and watercolors with us to Milan, and she has been using it gen at every opportunity. She even sketched sculptures in museums and churches. My wife and I are both delighted and a bit surprised, because this kind of drawing requires genuine concentration, which we don’t generally expect from a five-year-old.

Naturally, we are encouraging her interest as much as we can. In fact, it is easy to do, because there is a nice confluence between her and my interests. Lately, I also have been working on getting back to drawing – I use sketching as a memory-training exercise.

I have my own set of pencils and greyscale markers, and my daughter is always delighted when she gets to borrow them. However, grey is not a very useful colour, when one’s main subjects are princesses and unicorns. Still, she naturally wants to reciprocate and always asks if I would like to borrow her colourful markers.

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This past Sunday, she offered her markers again, and she also said that it would make her particularly happy if I used as many of the colours as possible. My initial impulse was to say “Thanks, but no thanks”, but then I decided to consider this as a creative challenge. In fact, using as many colours as possible is the opposite to restricting one’s palette, which is a common creative technique.

So, as a reference for my sketch, I chose a photo that I took the day before at the Carnival Ambrosiana. On it, my daughter is throwing a handful of confetti into the air. Here is the result – I satisfied the condition of using a whole bunch of colours in a single drawing!

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Sketching as memory training

At the park.
At the park.
One of the nice things of being on sabbatical is that I can try new things and new ways of doing old things without the fear of missing out on productivity. My rationalization is that since I am operating in a new environment anyway, it makes sense to let go of the daily routines, on which I typically depend.

A new thing that I am experimenting with now, while leaving in Milan, is sketching. This is not an entirely new activity for me, because I have been drawing and painting various things on and off for the past few years and I studied art during my school years.

This time, I am doing it in a more deliberate way. To be more precise, what I am doing is purposeful practice, in Anders Ericsson’s sense of the term. Deliberate practice would have included feedback from a teacher, whom I don’t have. Specifically, I am working on sharpening my observational skills, both in terms of the speed of capturing the salient features of the subject and in terms of the depth of observation.

Not to compare myself to Leonardo da Vinci, but Milan once was his stomping ground. He even put “draw Milan” in his now-famous to-do list. Also, Leonardo was arguably the most keen observer, who has ever lived. So I thought it would be a shame not to use the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.

First, I started sketching by using my photographs as references. My goal was to focus on a particular aspect of the photo and to capture the mood of the scene. I’ve done this type of drawing before, both digitally and using physical media, so I my goal was just to get into the habit of drawing regularly.

At the park.
At the park.
Last Sunday, I tried something different. I took my sketchbook to the park, where my daughter went to play on a sunny afternoon. At the park, I sat on the bench and sketched the parents, who were watching their children, talking on their phones, chatting to each other, etc. I wanted to capture the gestures, without focussing on the proportions, lighting, composition, etc. I found that it was quite easy to sketch people, who were just standing and sitting around, even though they periodically changed their poses. On the other hand, I had a hard time sketching people, who were walking by or cycling past me. There was just not enough time to capture the essential elements of their poses, before they were gone.

I think the speed of gathering the essential visual information is a trainable skill, though. My hypothesis is that the challenge is related to the limited capacity of our short-term memory. A visual image of a human figure, particularly in motion, contains a lot of information: proportions (e.g. width to height) of the body, relative angles of the shoulders, ribcage, pelvis, positions of the hands and feet, silhouette (including elements of clothing), lighting/shadows, etc. We can capture all of this information in one glance (probably, in less than two seconds), but cannot recall it when we need to reference it during actual drawing. On the other hand, the capacity of human long-term memory is nearly unlimited. In any case, it is certainly trainable. The limitation is that information cannot be committed to the long-term memory quickly. In my particular case of sketching passer-bys, my subjects were leaving the scene before I could memorize their poses.

Napoleon.
Napoleon.
So, my plan of improving the speed of observation is to follow a particular pattern when looking at the subjects:
1. Width-to-height ratio of the body.
2. Body angle.
3. Position of the limbs.
4. Silhouette.
5. Shadows.

Then, when sketching, I would follow the same pattern to recall this information.

Hopefully, with some training, I would be able to scan through the elements 1 – 5 more than once. This should enable me to account for the changing scene, lighting and poses. Actually, cycling through a pre-defined sequence of elements of the scene is an established attention-aid technique. It is used in teaching defensive driving by continuously going through a sequence of actions abbreviated as a mnemonic “SIPDE” – Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute.

Duomo
Duomo
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The purpose of travel blogging

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I have been thinking about the purpose of blogging. I like the idea that daily writing, or any creative process for that matter, is an integral part of forming the thoughts and opinions. In other words, you don’t actually know what you really think about a particular topic until you capture your thoughts in writing. A similar concept applies to capturing visual impressions in photos, paintings, etc.

Incidentally, sometimes we can formulate opinions and understanding by “talking them out” instead. I heard that Hemingway used to do this with his books. Here lies a bit of danger: unless you are as good as Hemingway, talking about your creative ideas might actually prevent you from writing about them (or painting them or doing the photo shoot). It can happen because talking does serve the purpose of fleshing out the ideas, but it is much easier than creating something persistent and tangible, like a pice of writing or an object of visual art. I believe this is why Seth Godin’s advice to writes is to keep their mouths shut about their book ideas until they actually have the books published and thus ready to be discussed.

Also, blogging is different from journalling, because the latter is private (and has a unique usefulness precisely because of that), while the former offers a way to practice expressing the ideas publicly.

Then, there might be an inherent usefulness of blogs to the audience, beyond mere entertainment. For example, yesterday, I was thrilled to discover that one of the first web publications I have read when I was a graduate student (which, given my age relative to the age of the Internet, makes it one of the first web publications, period), Philip Greenspun’s “Travels with Samantha” is still online and, as far as I remember, is in it’s original format. This is a travel blog/photo blog that was written before either of these terms existed. In retrospect, reading it, as well as photo.net, which was Greenspun’s personal website at the time (and the format and the content of which has changed significantly over the years), was a significant experience for me..

The mere fact that I still remember “Travels of Samantha” after all these years means that it must have had some effect on me. The rudimentary early ideas of mobile computing, my interest in hardware and gadgets, the interest in photography and my approach to it – they were shaped by Greenspun’s travel notes and photos. All these connections were completely hidden from me at the time.

Perhaps this blog might also turn out to be useful for someone in some mysterious way.

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Exhibit setup – behind the scenes

Panoramic view of Siena. Italy.

When my wife and I came back from a 3-week-long trip from Italy in 2009, we brought back about 15,000 photos, which now seems like not a big deal, but at that time it was a huge amount and a logistical challenge in terms of storage, processing, etc.

Now, as I was re-visiting them 7 years later, to prepare an exhibit at a local coffee shop, the challenge was to select just a few images from that set and to decide how to display them them next to each other: what sizes to print, for example. So I chose my favourite photo from the entire trip – the Florentine sunset, and printed it as the larges gallery wrap I knew we would be able to display – a 24 x 36 in canvas. We brought in to the cafe, held it against the wall, and at that point in became apparent what other images would work, at what size, how to position them relative to the main print.

The rest was, as you can see in the video, a matter of sticking the hooks to the wall, after double- or triple-checking the measurements, and voilà – we have a personal exhibit!

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On creating mental models

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At my daughter’s art studio, “4Cats”, there is a poster that half-jokingly lists the benefits of art education. Among these benefits are improved study skills and a possibility to make a fortune of selling your paintings.

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There is another skill that did not make the list, but which is taught through the practice of art (or any other creative process) – it is what psychologists call “creating mental models”.

Charles Duhigg wrote an entire chapter on this in his book “Smarter Faster Better.” According to him, some people are better than others at creating mental representations of current and future events. In other words, they continually narrate a story to themselves as they go about their day. By doing so, they work out a model of how the world works. The more detailed the story, the deeper the focus that these people are able to maintain. Also, when the life events actually unfold, people who are good at creating mental models are capable of making better decisions, because they already fave a forecast of the event, which can be compared to the real situation. Duhigg quoted Andy Billings of Electronic Arts, who said that modern companies are looking for people, who habitually tell stories, because this trait is an indication of the person ability to apply analytical observation to their experiences.

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As it is the case with many useful traits, creating mental models is a true skill, rather than an innate ability. In other words, it can be developed through practice. In fact, this is what children do when they play make-believe games, play with toys and, particularly, when they practice art. In regular, structured art lessons, the teacher outlines a plan for the process and then provides feedback on the progress at various stages. This way, the children are taught to imagine the final painting/drawing/sculpture, at least in some detail, and then compare what actually emerges as a result of their work to the mental images.

So art really is good for everyone – both to those, who create it, and those, who consume it – because it involves storytelling at every stage. And telling stories, it can be argued, is the most effective way of communication.

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Decluttering the tollbox

Portrait of a girl with camera.
Portrait of a girl with camera.

Consciously limiting the set of tools used in a given creative project is an effective way of focussing on the most important message. Artists often choose to limit their palette of colours for a particular painting, or even de-emphasize the role of either form or colour, as the Impressionists or the Cubists did, for example. Likewise in photography, it might be beneficial to work around the limitations of your gear instead of lugging around an enormous set of lenses and camera bodies.

I have been often referring to Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” lately, and he has an important point on using only a limited set of tools. There is a cost associated with adopting and using a new tool in your typical workflow. There are tangible resources, that are required to learn the new tool or technique, to keep it sharp (figuratively speaking), and to make decisions regarding whether using this tool would add to or detract from the process and the product. In other words, adopting and using a particular piece of gear or a technique has both advantages and disadvantages. A conventional craftsman would not adopt a new tool, unless it offers a net improvement of the process.

There is another benefit of limiting our toolset. If we don’t have many tools that have an overlapping set of capabilities, we learn to use the tools that we do have more effectively, i.e. we utilize them fully. This increases the efficiency, or return on investment, of these tools.

I find this happening with my use of iPhone camera apps. I have three of them – the built-in Camera, the Camera+ and the ProCamera. They are slightly different in terms of functions, and each is slightly better than the others at a particular aspect of the workflow. For example, I find the native Camera to be the best in terms of the synchronizing with the Photos app, instant sharing and shooting panoramas. The Camera+ is the most convenient for shooting in general – using pick focus and pick exposure, etc. (although lately it has been giving annoying delays and lag on my iPhone 6 Plus… Hm-m-m, this might be a good excuse reason to buy a faster phone…) The ProCamera is most convenient for shooting video. Having said this, the native Camera app is reasonably good overall, and not having to make decision on which app to use might make a difference between capturing a moment in time or missing it.

Old truck selfie.
Old truck selfie.
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How to go down in history: being the first or the last

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In a recent interview, Chuck Klosterman, the author of “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”, mentioned that while it is difficult to predict, which musician/artist/scientist would be considered the most historically important figure of the current period many years from now, it is unlikely that it would be someone, who is considered as the leader of his/her field right now. Klosterman suggests that in order to have retrospective historical weight, an author (or a piece of art, scientific work, etc.) needs to meet at least one of the two criteria: he/she/it needs to offer true innovation, i.e. to be the first the first ever in the specific field, or he/she/it must represent the culmination of the development of the field that changes how people think, i.e. to be the last in the field – the finishing touch that completes it and points to a fundamentally new paradigm.

Basically, history likes those who are are either the first or the last in their area of work.

This concept has some parallels with the strategy for creating innovations outlined by Cal Newport in “Deep Work”: be on the leading edge of your field and then look just beyond it using patterns similar to those that exist (and are already known) in other fields.

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Of course, following the Newport’s strategy does not guarantee that the future generations will pick your work as singularly significant. However, stepping beyond the leading edge of your field gives you the chance to be the first in a completely new area, while getting to the leading edge gives you the chance to be the last in your field – the one who applies the unifying finishing touch to the existing body of work.

There are a couple of implications of this concept. First, you cannot be a narrow specialist. In order to apply known patterns from other areas, you need to have at least some knowledge of the fields beside your own area of expertise. As Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his famous “The Book of Five Rings, “Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.”

Second, you cannot be a pure generalist either. You need to specialize in something in order to develop the deep expertise that would enable you to do cutting edge work in this area. Becoming an expert of that caliber is, of course, the hardest part of the process.

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No big deal

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At my daughter’s birthday party, which was held at a local art studio, the children were reminded about one of the “rules” of conduct at the studio. The rule was “No big deal!”, as in “If I accidentally get paint on the floor, it’s no big deal” or “If I mess up my clay dragon and have to redo it all over again, it’s no big deal.”

For a creative process to be effective, it is important not to take things, particularly your own work, too seriously. That is why it is sometimes useful to choose disposable media for your work to avoid putting excessive emphasis on the result, where the process is inherently more valuable. Julia Cameron wrote in “The Artist’s Way” that in order to make art, we must be ready to make bad art, at least initially. I heard some writers say that if you work for hours to write a thousand words, and then end up throwing out everything except the last couple of sentences in revisions, the hours spent on this should not be considered a wasted time – writing the text that was ultimately thrown out was a necessary step in creating the last two good sentences.

In other words, it’s no big deal that it takes longer than what we thought it should have taken to create something of value. We should just accept it and enjoy the process. After all, they said at my daughter’s party that the main rule of the art studio was “Have fun!”

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Analytical observation: why we like what we like

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Last year in Milan, I saw two exhibits related to Leonardo da Vinci’s work. One displayed his original notebooks, and the other, Leonardo3, showed models of his engineering designs. What impressed me the most is how much Leonardo was able to accomplish, both as an artist and as a scientist, by simply observing nature. When I think about it a little deeper, though, I realize that he was not “simply” observing the phenomena that interested him – he was was simultaneously analyzing them.

Cultivating the skill of analytical observation of everything that surrounds us is tremendously useful, even just as an exercise in concentration, which, in turn, is a basis for any deep work. One effective way of doing it is to start with things that genuinely interest you and to try to answer the question “Why am I interested in it?” For example, if it is a movie, a book or a piece of art, instead of engaging with it as a form of escapism, it would be more productive (and, arguably, more enjoyable) to think about what makes the object so interesting while we are watching/reading/observing it.

In fact, I think there are three questions that set up a framework for analysis on any piece of creative work, from a piece of art to a scientific paper. Cal Newport identified them as part of his process of reviewing technical papers.

  1. What is the main point of the work (what makes it good/interesting)?
  2. What makes it different from other works (books/photographs/research projects)?
  3. What techniques were used to achieve the result?

Perhaps, applying this framework to our everyday activities, would put us at risk of making everything we do too mechanical, robbing us of the joy of doing thing purely for fun, without any agenda. On the other hand, this can be a way to a more mindful way of doing things we like and in the process learning about these things and about ourselves.

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How to quit

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“Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.”
― Donald Justice

When I first started practicing kendo several years ago, whenever I would meet with Japanese sensei, they would ask: “Why did you begin doing kendo?” Being a foreigner, the answer was always easy: I like Japanese culture, history, food, etc. Recently, I heard a a different question: “Why do you still practice kendo?” My first reply, which I thought was quite funny, was “Because samurai never quit.” Seriously, though, I find this to be a much harder question than the first one, just like sustaining motivation for practice is more difficult than obtaining it initially.

I think this is true with any activity that you have been doing for many years and that has become a big part of your life. You do it “seriously”, as people would call it. Dan Heller even introduced a gradation of levels of seriousness with which amateurs pursue their activities (it was photography in his case): beginner photographer, serious photographer, insanely serious photographer,.. After a while, you begin to realize just how large the part of your life that you are devoting to your activity of choice (photography, kendo, ) really is. It takes a lot of time, money, mental and emotional resources. Becoming any good requires both quality and quantity of practice. I am not saying that the benefits are not worth it, but whatever you invest into the activity does add up, both in the positive and in the negative sense.

You might wonder, “Just imagine how much time I would have if I quit that thing that I have been doing”. Wo-o-o-o… it’s a very un-samurai-like thought, but after all, some of us are also scientists or at least (think that) they like logic, so let’s think it through.


First of all, you might not have to “quit” per se to be able to claw back some time and mental resources. You might be able to dial down the amount of practice, because your experience should enable you to maximize the quality of practice during the remaining sessions. The returns on increasing the amount of naive practice, to borrow the term from Anders Ericsson, are rapidly diminishing anyway, so you might as well replace it with deliberate practice.

Second, even if you quit a highly structured practice regime that has been incorporated into your routine over the years, you might not be able to immediately reclaim all the freed-up time in an efficient manner. For example, when I have a looming deadline on a work-related project and decide to skip a kendo practice in order to get some of the work done, I typically find that the uninterrupted chunk of time that is typically devoted to kendo becomes fragmented by interruptions (usually, procrastination that manifests itself in one form or another) that exist because a routine for alternative work has not been established. So unless you are prepared to quit something for good or at least for a substantial period of time (like taking a six-months sabbatical from your usual activities, which would allow you to genuinely try something new and to make a new habit of it), it is actually not worth doing if your goal is to free up time for other projects.

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