From the category archives:

Autism

Allowing for mistakes (Drawing: Towers)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday July 30, 2007

A botched experiment

This was supposed to be the fourth part of my five part series about drawing a dark color around a lighter one. But the fourth experiment was something of a failure.

I was curious whether it was possible to draw on top of the hair spray I use to fixate my drawings. And if so what would happen if I would draw stars on fixated blue.
It turns out that it is possible to draw on top of a fixate drawing. But yellow stars on top of blue fixate or otherwise are invisible. To bad.

Yellow on black

But it got me thinking about something else. I wanted to draw black rectangles and color them yellow.
There are two problems with that idea. Firstly black stains very easily. So if I were to start with the rectangles and then come back to color them the whole drawing would be ruined by a lot of stains.
Secondly black isn’t really black. When you mix it with yellow you get a green like color. So if I would start with yellow oblongs and then draw black around them, the lines would turn green.

How nice that it is possible to draw on top of fixate.

Towers

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License to fail

Don’t know if you noticed it but this drawing is riddled with mistakes. Lines are crooked and not in line with each other.

I’ve always been afraid of making mistakes. Afraid to the point where I rather do nothing then make even the smallest of mistakes.

There must be something in my youth that explains this fear. Maybe a teacher or one of my parents who gave heavy handed punishments if I made a small mistake.
The problem is that I can’t remember anything of that nature.

The last few months I’ve been wondering whether it is possible that this has something to do with autism and I think it has.
People with autism tend to get fixated on little details and forget the big picture.

For instance last week I commented on the weblogtoolscollection site on a post about keyboard shortcuts. I told them that I had found that ctrl-<number> a highlighted piece of text will give you a header (in WordPress).
A few hours later I realized that I had made a mistake. It shouldn’t be ctrl-<number> but cntrl-<number>. I had forgotten an “n”.

This time I was able to put it in perspective. The abbreviation for “control” is both written with an “n” and without an “n”. So it isn’t really a mistake and it doesn’t bother me all the much. But until a few weeks ago something like this could bother me for weeks, even month.

Now I know. But up till last September I never knew I had autism. I never knew I tended to fixate on the little details and forget the big picture. I didn’t know I had to put situations in perspective and force myself to look at the big picture.

Better drawing

I’m learning that mistakes in a drawing aren’t necessary mistakes.
In my drawing Sideways I made several mistakes. If you look closely there is one yellow circle that’s a little red. Couldn’t cover that one up.
There are also several circles that are in the wrong place. I had to draw extra circles in places I didn’t plan to cover these mistakes up and it actually made the drawing a lot more interesting then would have been the case without the mistake.

For this drawing I planned to make mistakes. So instead of using a ruler to get all line straight and in line I drew them by hand. That way the lines aren’t perfect but they are a life.

Featured on See me draw

Rob Gonsalves draws wonderful pictures that have the same magical feel as drawings by Escher

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Difficulty in taking advice (drawing: Tentacles)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday July 3, 2007

You should do…

I’ve never been very good at taking advice. People would tell me how to do something and I’d try my own methods and they would call me stubborn for not taking advice.

There’s a lot of advice floating around on the Internet about the best methods to get a lot of people to visit your website. You should concentrate all your efforts on one subject. If you want to write about two subjects. Fine. But not on one website. Built a second website to talk about your second subject.
But since I don’t take advice I’ve been thinking about all the subjects I could talk about on this website. And in doing so I run in to something of a brick wall. There are thousands of subjects about which I could talk. But there’re only a few subjects of which I know enough to make my writings really interesting.

I been asking myself why it’s so difficult to make a choice between taking the advice and, maybe, creating a website that a lot of people will visit or being stubborn and doing things my way.

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An example

Looking to my stats it’s certainly true that most people reach this blog looking for something that has to do with drawing. But couldn’t that just be something of a self fulfilling prophecy. I write a lot about “drawing” so I’ll attract a lot of people who are looking for the subject “drawing”. If I where to write a lot about “cars” I would attract people looking for the subject “cars”.
Some time ago I tried to draw an excavator and a few people from Russia came looking for “drawing excavators”.

This morning I got to think that something else might be going on:
There are several hundreds of millions pages on the Internet but if you’re Googling for “drawing excavator” you’ll get to the 7th page before you’ll even find anything that’s remotely about drawing. Everything before that has to do with building excavators.
After I realized that, I thought that maybe the advice isn’t so much about what I’m offering. It’s about what people are looking for.

The next step is comparing the subjects I offer to the subjects people are looking for.

What do I write about?

Drawing
Autism
Me
Promen (the sheltered workplace in Gouda)
What ever comes to mind.

How does that compare to the subject people are looking for.

Hundreds of thousands of people are looking for the way to draw portraits, trees, cars and a few Russians want to know how to draw excavators.
Thousands of people want information about autism.
A few of my colleagues’s and family members know I write a blog. But usually they have the URL so they won’t be looking for me on a search engine.
A few hundred people a year are put on Promen’s waiting list. They might be looking for information about Promen.
What ever comes to mind is so vague that I can’t expect people are looking for it.

What’s the problem?

So why do I have such a hard time following this advice? Why, in general, do I have such a hard time following advice?

After thinking about that for a while I realized that is because most advice doesn’t hold true for me. People advice my to use skills I never learned. They don’t consider advising me to use skills I do know. Neither do they help me acquire the skills I miss. They just tell me I’m stubborn for not doing what I’m told.

It’s like telling someone with a spinal cord lesion that the best way to get to the second floor is to scale the stairs.
Which of course is the problem. Nobody knew that I had autism. I didn’t know. But now I do. Now I can start judging which skills I’ve learned, which skills I should learn and which skills are impossible for me to learn.

It also means that I should start thinking about which advice I should follow and which advice I won’t follow.

In this case it’s clear that I should follow the advice about what to write about on my blog: Mainly about drawing, the skills involved in drawing and the way I conceptualize drawings. Secondly about how autism and other circumstances influence the drawings I make.

Tentacles

After trying for a few days to draw a color fountain I felt I should try to do something else with the connection between water and colors. Maybe I can have colors flow in a kind of river.
To try this I made this drawing.

Tentacles

But as always when I start out with thinking of a title instead of just drawing one of the pictures in my mind, I’m finding the drawing won’t fit the title. Since the drawing is much more important that the title I’ve changed the title.

Link

Wasted beauty is beautiful site with eerie pencil drawings.

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The movies in my mind (drawing: Color fountain 1st sketch)

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 27, 2007

Thinking in pictures

One of the strange things of discovering that you have autism is that you get to meet a lot of experts who tell you that you have all kind of problems you never knew you had. Among other I’ve been told that I’ve problems concentrating. When I’m doing something it could very well happen that the softest of sounds would disturb me.
This is strange because it’s not really a problem I’ve been experiencing. On the contrary. People have been telling me for years that I should pay more attention to what happens around me. When I’m doing something I seem to shut out the rest of the world and a war could break out without me noticing it.

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An other problem I’m supposed to have is a problem with seeing the generality. Apparently people with autism are very good at noticing details but they tend to miss the big picture.
This was also a problem were I at first thought that the experts were wrong. I’ve always had the feeling that I’m as good as seeing the big picture as anyone. But after trying to draw the picture in my mind I’ve found that my ideas about how I see the world were completely off.
I’m finding that I don’t see one world. I see something of a collection of little picture that are patched together to form a big picture of the world.
Only thing is that the collection isn’t complete. Of some parts of the world I’ve have hundreds of pictures in my mind and other parts are completely blank.

How to discribe this

I’ve actually read about this phenomenon before I knew that I had autism and I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t imagine the kind of vision of the world people who think in picture would have. Now I’ve found that I’m one of those people who think in pictures I’m starting to understand why description I’ve read where so incomprehensible. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time but I too have found that there is no good way to explain the way I see the world.

To really explain it you should make some kind of movie. But since nobody understands what it is we’re talking about nobody will ever make that movie.
Or will they…
It turns out that Microsoft has been working on a program, Photosynth, that is used to link large amounts of pictures. The program looks for details in the pictures. By linking pictures at overlapping details you get a kind of movie of a building or landscape.

My world

Microsoft has a working demo (IE only) were you can see a building composed of hundreds of pictures.
As you move around this building you’ll get to see the world as I see it.

Lots of pictures.
Perspective changes from picture to pictures.
There are hardly any pictures that give you an over view.
There are a lot of pictures with details of the building.
You get a real live feeling of the geometry the building.

Color fountain

Color fountain 1st sketch

This is horrible.
I don’t understand why there is so much brown in this drawing. This was not what I had in mind.
I’ll have to try to make this drawing some other way.

Link

Do you like elephants? At this site you’ll find drawings of elephants and other zoo animals.

To my regular readers

I’m running into the problem that I can’t maintain a frequence of 5 drawings a week. I’m slowly getting to the point were I want to do more complicated projects and it is very hard to do those if you’re struggling to meet a deadline. To give myself a little breathing room I’ve build a little stock of drawings.
I can produce about three drawings in a week so I’ve dropped the posts frequence.
(I’ve just finished a very nice drawing called “Who’s afraid of yellow, red (and blue)” that you’ll get to see in one and a half week.)

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Why auties don’t represent themselfs (drawing: Nose mountain)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 12, 2007

Joel over at “NTs are weird” writes a lot about why auties don’t represent them selves. That was one of the first questions I asked the first time I visited the Autie club in Rotterdam (in the Netherlands). This club is established and run by Neuro Typicals and although there are some auties on the board the NT’s have a big say in the running of the club.

The second question I asked is “why don’t we?” Although, as I understand it Joel has a lot of difficulty in dealing with NT’s, I don’t. I’ve have nearly twenty years experience in organizing clubs with the mentally impaired and with children. It’s a lot of work to start but after a while you share the load and it becomes easier.

Nose mountain

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But after going to the club for a while I’ve decided that I won’t even try. For several reasons. Some of which have to do with autism, some with my personal live.

For one thing to establish a club you have to talk a lot with a lot of people and I don’t like talking. It might be that it will become easier after my big examination but for now it’s not something I would want to do.

But most of the reasons have to do with my feelings for my fellow auties. Or rather the lack of feelings. Auties should be “my kind of people” but they’re not. I feel more alike with my mentally and physically impairmered colleagues at the sheltered workplace then with other auties. I do have the feeling that I don’t have to prove myself. I presume that when I sit quietly in a corner people will know that’s not because I don’t like them but because I don’t like talking.

Not talking to each other also is a point. I’ve been watching the conversation over at Wrong planet for a while and it seems to me that auties don’t really talk to each other. Someone thinks of a subject and hundreds of auties react with a story of there own but nobody reacts to stories of the others.

I see the same at the Autie club. People going round telling there stories. They come to me and I react with something like “oh”, “ah” and “that’s great!”. But I don’t feel the need to pursuit the matter so they go on to the next person to tell the same story. Auties tend to flock round the NT’s because the NT’s do have the need discuss the story. Conversation between auties on the Internet at large also seem to go along these lines. As far as I’ve seen auties are great at announcing something but the NT’s are discussing.

Isn’t that the biggest difference between auties and NT’s? NT’s need to do things together with other people and will go to great lengths to get a lot of people in one room. Where as we auties like to pursuit our own projects, sometimes together with other people but we don’t have the need to be together.

Does this mean that we will never be able to represent our selves?

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Cul de sac (drawing: Topographical face final sketch)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday June 11, 2007

It took several sketches before I realized that there was something wrong with the way I use my colors. I make parts of the face darker that should be lighter.

Topographical face final sketch

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It seems that I have some kind of synthesis between touch and sight. While I look at something I also “feel” it. When I try to remember how something looks the shape is the most powerful memory.

I thought it would be nice to try to draw a face the way I see it in my mind. Like a sort of statue with thicker (darker) and thinner (lighter) parts. But it isn’t. It’s boring to look at. This is the second and final drawing using this concept.

But it has given me some ideas about the relation between landscape and portraits.

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Piano genius (drawing: Apples and pears)

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday June 7, 2007

Last week I wanted to do a still live about apples and pears but for the live of me I couldn’t remember what apples looked like. Just now I though I draw a banana and the apple just flowed out of my pencil.

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can watch who is watching you. Well not exactly. Via my stats counter I can see where people who visit my site come from. In which city there ISP lives, which ISP they use, which site pointed them to my site. But I can’t see who they are.

Apples and pears

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So a few weeks ago someone in an American town I never knew existed took an hour out to visit my site. That’s a nice all be it surprising act.

Last week while I was thinking of ways to get more visitors I though I might use Del.icio.us to publish the fact that my weblog exists. So now with every entry I post I post a link at del.icio.us.

Using my stats counter I can see that it works. Some of the people who visit me come from del.icio.us drawing page, page 6. Or del.icio.us art page, page 4. I’ve tried looking the link up. But the del.icio.us pages change rapidly. So I stopped trying to find them.

Last Monday I noticed that someone had reach me from a del.icio.us page with a tag I hadn’t used. That surprised me enough to go and have a look.

It turned out that someone found my del.icio.us bookmarks interesting enough to subscribe to my bookmark stream. That’s funny. I never though that anyone could like the way I see the world.

Curious as to what else he might find interesting I took a RSS feed on his subscription page.

The first link I got was of a Youtube showing of a documantary about the autistic music savant piano genius Derek Paravicini prepairing for a concert in the States in front of a crowd of 10,000 people.

This guy really plays the most beautiful pieces of piano music. The documantary is shown in 5 parts totaling close to 50 minutes, but it is wurth it. I’m linking to all five parts:

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Cousin Eddy visits the Netherlands (drawing: Neighbors tree)

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 6, 2007

When I was five my cousin Eddy emigrated to Canada.

Twenty five years ago he came back for a visit. I don’t remember very much of that.

Last Saturday my father called to tell me that Eddy would be visiting his sister Ina on Sunday. My father would go there and he asked me whether I liked to join him. I did.

Ina had invited several of her brother friends from the old days and her neighbours. The weather was beautiful so we sat in the garden. She makes a living of being a garden artist so she has a nice, all be it small, garden.

Neighbors tree

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I took the opitionity to observe these neuro typicals. One of my bigger problems in dealing with people is that I never knew what to say to them. So while everyone around me was busy having a conversation, I was watching in silence. But now I know that I have a problem with talking I don’t consider it a problem anymore.

But there is something more going on. It’s not only that I have a problem with talking. It’s also that I wouldn’t know what to say to these people.

My father asked Eddy for how long he would be staying in the Netherlands and when he arrived. Which is a strange question because just last week he talked about that with Ina. So Why would he ask Eddy the same question.

Ina’s neighbor had a few stories about things I don’t remember. Couldn’t be very important.

With some surprise she pointed us to a strange tree in a neighbors garden she thought to be dying. From her kitchen she only could see the leave less top.

Although I liked the visit I concluded that what neuro typicals tell each other, about liking to hear each others voice, is true. Most of the things they talked about weren’t that important. It seemed as though they were just making noise.

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Being autistic (drawing: Looking out of my kitchen window)

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 5, 2007

Bart Westgeest suggested that I should use three colors green for a tree instead of two, four or five as I’ve been trying up till now. He suggest that especially the middle color is important. I’ve used three greens for this pictures although probably not in the way he meant.

It’s now a little over six months ago that I discovered that I’m autistic and I must say that although it took some getting used to it has made my live a lot easier.

Last Wednesday I had a … attack. I don’t know what to call the feeling but it isn’t a nice feeling. Somewhere between feeling trapped and being restless.

Looking out of my kitchen window

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I have had it before. Lots of times. Up till now when I got this feeling I asked my manager for the rest of the day off and usually got it. But since it was a feeling I had lots of times it meant that I never took vacation because I needed my days for the … attack.

This time was different in that I knew that it had something to do with autism. I even had some idea as to what caused the attack: The work I’ve been doing was a little bit to chaotic for me. I liked it and I’ll probably do it again but I must make it clear to my manager that I decide when it is time to quit. This time he forced me to go on when I wanted to stop.

It has been like this for the last few months. Slowly all sorts of strange problems I’ve been having for most of my live are making more sense. For instance I never understood why people didn’t take me serious when I said that I didn’t like some kind of work. Now I know that was because I didn’t formulated it the right way.

For me “I don’t like” means every thing varying from I don’t like being tickled to I don’t like being killed. But Neuro Typical don’t see it like that. They use words that not only tell you what feeling they have but also to what degree they have that feeling. So they will tell you they don’t like some kind of work but do it if they must or they’ll tell you that they hate some kind of work and they won’t do it what ever the consequence.

Off course I always told people that I didn’t like something and that I wouldn’t do it what ever the consequence and people told me that I was being stubborn. I never understood why I was being stubborn while the next person was allow not to do the work.

Always being tench was also one of the strange things. Especially always talking to myself. I always had the feeling that talking to myself had something to do with tension but I never was sure. Nor did I understand what caused the tension.

Now I know. There are several causes but the most important has to do with the way I feel temperature. When I put on a sweater I feel cold shivers going down my back. Literally. My back doesn’t feel warmth. Or rather my back does feel warmth but everything is a little bit colder. Sweaters, showers even a sauna bath feels a little colder on my back.

When I first discovered this, it frightened me. It took a lot of getting used to.

When I go outside in the winter and I feel cold that doesn’t mean that my coat is to thin. It means that my coat is to thick.

But after a few months I’ve gotten used to it. I learning how to interpret the strange feelings I have. I’m learning how to understand them. I’m learning how to deal with them.

Hopefully in a few weeks I will get a large examination and find out what kind of autism I have and learn more about my feelings.

The only problem is the waiting list. I was registered in September 2006 and was told that the waiting period would be about six months. ByOctober I got a letter informing me that the waiting period had gone up to seven months. At the beginning of April I contacted them and was told that my examination would start within six weeks. In May they told me that it would be within three weeks.

I will be calling them again next monday.

But still. Although it’s sometime a frightening experience I am learning about myself.

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Command voice (Drawing: Mask)

by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 4, 2007

Mask

The last few years I’ve been telling people that I don’t like talking. But every time I say so someone tells me that I’m very good in formulating my thoughts, which I am. They also tell me that I talk a lot. Which I don’t.

After being told that I am autistic I have slowly become aware of the fact that I have a very hard time in recognizing my own feelings: In December it dawned on me that a strange feeling in my right leg that I’ve had for years was pain.

How could you be unaware of the fact that you are feeling pain? I am!

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In my teens I often used something I called my “command voice”.

Usely when I opened my mouth and said something no one listened. Which actually didn’t matter all that much. I didn’t have a lot to say. But when I used my command voice people listened. It was hard work to use it, but I liked the result.

But when I became an adult I lost my command voice. Partly because I forgot. Maybe also because I didn’t need it as much. I learned that I also could connect to people by looking them in the eye.

Over the years I became very proficient at connecting to people. Or so I thought.

The last few month I’ve learned that neuro typicals don’t have the feeling that they are connecting to somebody when the look someone in the eye. They only have that feeling when the hear someone.

Last night while I was having a very tiring conversation with someone I notice that what it was that made it tiring. I had to force my voice out of my body to be heard.

I hadn’t lost my command voice. I just learned to use it all the time. That’s why it’s so tiring to talk with people.

Again something I learned but was better without. Now I have to make a choice between not being heard or being tired all the time.

Maybe there is a third alternative.

(While I was drawing this picture my father turned 77. I thought this might make a nice present so I had it framed. He put it in a prominent space in his study )

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From detail to big picture (Sketch: Working on a excavator)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 16, 2007

Stephen Wiltshir is a autistic savant. He flies one time over the inner city of Rome and from that he can draw a detailed picture of the town.

People look at him in awe and wonder how it is possible that he remembers so much detail. I’ve wondered how he could remember so much detail. I’ve been taught that you start out with the big picture and go back to fill in the details. But now I’m trying it I’m finding that is not the way my memory works.

Working on a excavator

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I don’t remember the big picture. I only have a lot of detail.

The clever thing in what Stephen Wiltshire does is not that he remembers all the detail but that he remembers so much detail that they over lap. Mine don’t. When I try to draw something I remember a lot of detail but I don’t remember enough of the big picture to draw it.

When I look at his picture of the Tokyo skyline I wonder whether I should be jealous of his drawing skills. But I don’t actually think he is drawing. I think he is tracing the picture he sees in his mind.

At the moment I’m kind of at a loss as to how to proceed. When I started drawing a few month ago I expected that I would learn how to make my drawing look like pictures. But after a while I learned that that wasn’t possible. Then I thought that my pictures would look something like those of Stephen Wiltshire. Not with the same amount of detail but something in the general direction.

At this point it seems that I have to make a choise: Either I try to draw object like they are and walk back and forth as often as it needs to get a clear picture in my mind. Or I draw detail of an object and find a way of convey to my audience what it is supposed to be. Either by the way I name it or maybe with a little story.

The question I ask myselve is whether those two methodes are actually excluding each other. Couldn’t I find a way to do both?

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