Erasers and Undos
Note: The following post was originally posted on January 13th, 2005. I wasn’t very good about maintaining my blog back then and lost the 3-4 posts from this era, but thankfully the Internet Wayback Machine saved them for me.
The popularity of digital art tools, especially Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, has led to a bit of a crisis in the visual arts. Students are learning with the handicap of the undo–a useful crutch, but a crutch all the same. As my art professor pontificated yesterday, a good artist doesn’t worry about making mistakes, because a good artist knows how to fix these mistakes.
This reminded me of a saying public television art legend Bob Ross would often say, “We don’t make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents.” That truly was the genius of Bob, he knew that for many amateurs, things would just seem to happen with the brush. Bob would show how these accidents could be turned into something wonderful. Bob’s “happy mistakes” turned the tedium of painting into a joy.
This necessity to adapt, the process of discovering the tabula rasa, is slowly being lost in an era of infinite undo’s and thousands of layers. It may be turning a generation of digital artists and designers into hopeless perfectionists. I can’t count how many times people have pined for a real-life undo button for their analog artwork, and I even find myself doing so at times. Somehow the eraser isn’t quite as gratifying as a perfect undo step. The challenge the digital artist constantly faces is to constantly draw in their sketchbooks, paint on their canvas or paper, and force themselves to tackle difficult challenges and mistakes in order to improve their artistic abilities.
Tags: art, artists, commentary, digital