drawing
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
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Thanks, Lloyd, for highlighting a drawing. Instead of using screen capture to create an image of the table to put on his page Lloyd used the source for the table, and so because, I think, I didn't specify a height and width for the table overall, but only for certain cells, the table displays on his weblog much narrower, in fact changing a horizontal rectangle to a vertical which, when I look at it, I say, no, no, that's not right, the two vertical red and blue bars are way too large and intense in color. Just to point out that there is a composition going on here, as much as I can control in HTML, and that when the composition changes so does the drawing.
Everyday, draw a little. Some of it is obviously poking around, looking for something and not getting there, trying again the next day. Now and then one thing turns into something which leads to another and then another.
Sometimes the drawings are not really about the drawings, it's about the drawing supporting something else, a way of coaxing forth a little writing, a few words, some small memories, a thing seen or heard or wondered about or wished for. "People I Have Known" is an example of a very simple approach I used to generate a number of very small memories by looking everday at a variation in a series, and making myself look at the little drawing until I remembered someone I hadn't thought about in a very long time. The connection between the drawing and text is very thin, but instead the drawing was used more as a device for writing.
Another series of short stories from July continues this idea and shows a greater effort in terms of pushing tables for drawing and in trying to match text to image. In this series I wrote first and drew second. The drawings are meant to be much closer to a representation, perhaps even an illustration, of the text. I think maybe half of these are successful, with about four of them getting closer to what I'm looking for in abstraction as representation, not as depiction. (BTW, I made some thumbnails of these pictures months back and was going to write about which I thought were and weren't successful and why, but haven't got to it yet.)
Sometimes I really push this kind of drawing and get into more intricate tables, for example the Sea Ranch drawings, or the series inspired by the book Early Chinese Texts on Painting called "The Asian Influence In Drawing." Both of these series really are more about drawings that stand alone. The drawings are more much complex with dozens of lines of HTML, and they can take a fair amount more time. By time I mean sixty to ninety minutes as opposed to fifteen to thirty.
Everyday, draw a little, write a little; it adds up, I learn some things, and if I look back over and think about what added up the learning is maybe doubled, and I get ideas about where to go next, how to use what happened before, what to avoid, and what to synthesize.
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Something to write about:
Started as an edutech blog, participated in that community, wrote about blogging, but didn't want to stay at that level, wanted to be a practitioner;
Weblog as a studio, portfolio, content and knowledge manager, that is a work place and a place to document the work, a place that shows development and change over time, a place to display things and reflect on them;
Mine shows the use of a weblog for personal work and presentation, something closer to what I would want my own students to be doing, journaling, sketchbook, workspace;
How I needed to use my weblog for my own work, not my work's work, to better demonstrate use of a weblog for work and learning;
Stepping out of the teacher role to be a real user, not to talk about weblogs, but to use a weblog for personal work;
A phrase I never use, but might do so carefully here, "those that can, do, and those that can't...," not weblogging about weblogging and tech and edu, but a weblog as a personal content-specific (and tangential topics) studio, office, desk, etc.
Think of BAWP- teachers of writing need to be writers, so teachers and thinkers and developers of technology need to use the technology personally
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Comparing yesterday and today.
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I like this drawing:
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