by Henk ter Heide on Saturday June 6, 2009
I know. This is rather a cheesy title, isn’t it 
But the lessons I learned are so defining for my development as an artist that I can’t continue this blog without sharing it with you. So here it goes.
An immigrant’s son starts a business. Kind of a fish and chips shop (although in the Netherlands we don’t eat fish with our chips).
This is very special. Most immigrant’s son (and daughters) are unemployed. Some are getting their degrees.
A few (male) immigrants have their own tailor shop. But I know of only 3 or 4 entrepreneurial immigrant’s sons.
Although his shop is down the road from where I live I hardly ever go there. I don’t eat as much chips as I used to. When I go there it’s usually on odd hours and I’m the only customer. Which is nice because it gives me the change to talk a little with him.
He’s clearly very proud of his business and rightly so.
Last Thursday I didn’t feel like cooking and I went down to his shop to buy me some chips and fried meat. He was serving a few customers so I had to wait for a while. Which gave me the opportunity to watch him work.
I noticed a few strange things.
First I saw him watering his satay sauce down. I must say that I never seen anybody do that.
At first I thought he did it because the sauce had gotten too dry but soon I found that he was running out of sauce. Which is very bad timing on his part. But he commented that it’s something that could happen to anybody.
Then I noticed him running through his shop to get some meat out of the fridge.
When it finally was my turn I realized that he had taken as much time to serve three customers as most (fish and) chips sellers need to serve a dozen customers.
So while I was waiting for my bag of chips I wondered why there was such a gap between his and mine impression of his business. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about how I could explain it to him that I realized the problem.
Because he’s an immigrant’s son it’s not PC to comment on his business. He could think that you were actually commenting on the color of his skin.
So nobody ever does.
And if nobody ever comments on the way you do your business you must be doing a very good job.
So there it is. The story about one thing I learned while waiting for chips.
If you’ve ever read any advise on how you should go about writing a blog you’ll know that titles are very important.
If you want to become popular you should at least publish a few stories about things you’ve learned and the more cheesy the title the better.
But I don’t want to become popular. Or actually I do, but not in that way.
So I was planning to file this story away as something funny I couldn’t use in my blog. But the story kept bugging me.
This morning I realized why.
I’m in the same boat as this immigrant’s son. Apart from a few trolling art teachers (who are willing to give me a thousand boring exercises if I only turn control of this weblog over to them), I get hardly any criticism.
People tell me that I’m talented and how much they like me telling about my life. But as nice as it is to get compliments you don’t learn anything from them. You learn from criticism.
Which means that I’ll have to criticize myself.
Thinking about this, and some other problems I’ve run into, I realized that this will impact the way I write my blog.
I never aspired to be a day painter because I think that day painters let the need to publish daily trump the quality of their work. But this will probably mean that I post even less then I’ve done up till now.
The decision to criticize myself defines me as an artist: I’m not a blogger who draws but a drawing artist who blogs.
This means that I’m going to break every rule out of the blogging rule book.
In this blog I’m writing an account of my journey to become a better artist.
I’ll do that the way that feels best to me. I won’t be posting regularly. Sometimes I might be gone for a few days (or even weeks) if that is what I need.
You’re welcome to join my journey (rss feed).
But it is my journey!
No compromises.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 2, 2009
A few days ago I wrote that I had to get some things out of my system before I could really concentrate on drawing. I even started with an article about unemployment.
But now I’m feeling that isn’t it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t yet really know how my process works.
This morning I realized what the problem was with the drawing I was planning. It was not, as I was thinking, that the different parts of the drawing could present problems. It was the drawing it self.
I had printed a photo of some beautiful actress with blond hair that I was planning to copy.
The problem is that I don’t copy.
It’s like I’m making a kind of choice. Only it isn’t a choice.
The choice would be that I rather make a bad original drawing then a good copy. But that is not it.
It’s more like I can’t force myself to copy anything.
It doesn’t matter what good reasons there might be for making a copy (getting practice, feeling safe). I just can’t do it.
Maybe I should just accept that while I’m switching to this, relatively, new interest I’ll draw when I have something to draw. The rest of the time I will fill with thinking about it and searching for beautiful art to fill my web pages.
Anyway. About todays drawing.
I bought Jack Hamm’s book about drawing land and seascapes and found that it’s almost the opposite of his book on portrait and figure drawing.
Where the book on portraits starts with almost no theory and a lot of pictures of body parts to copy. The book on landscapes starts with 20 pages of theory on composition.
And what a theory. I’ve been drawing and reading about drawing and painting on and off for the last 30 years. But Hamm teaches me more about composition in the first 8 pages then I had learned up till now.
Since business is slow at my job at the moment I took the book to work and forgot to take it back home for the Whit weekend. So Saturday when I had a little time I couldn’t read the book but I could think about what I have read.
The theory is that you should not put your subject in the middle of your frame. Well you could if you wanted to. But you’d get an interesting picture if you don’t.
At first I started thinking about holiday snapshots.
Let’s say you want to photograph a family of five in front of a large old oak.
The most obvious choice would be to line the family up with the oak behind the person in the middle. And shoot them head to toe with the tree trunk showing above the head of the person in the middle.
But you’d get a much more interesting picture if you have the tree behind the second person in the line.
Shoot the people head to middle with a little more then a quarter of the frame showing either the sky or low hanging branches.
Or so it is written on page 5 of the book. Page 6 and 7 talks about catching the eye of the audience in a circler motion by putting interesting feature of the drawing on specific lines.
This drawing is an attempt at that.
EyeSee
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday May 24, 2009
Last week I wrote that I would print out a picture of some actress and draw a portrait of her. But it’s taking a little longer then I expected.
I’ve run into a little printer problem and a big self confidence problem.
This is not the first self confidence problem I’ve had over the last few years. And every time I find that I get very angry with you, my visitors.
I like to compare myself with Vincent van Gogh a famous Dutch painter.
Nowadays his paintings sell for millions of dollars a piece but in his time he wasn’t famous at all. His brother bought a few paintings from him but that was about it. He even checked himself into a madhouse at some point in his live and nobody cared.
That’s far cry from how I feel my live as an artist.
I’m not famous at all but I do have a public that’s waiting for every thing I have to say and every thing I have to show.
Sometimes it feels as though they are like vultures, ever circling.
It’s not fair.
But then after a few days my self confidence problem passes and I realize that I’m the one who’s not being fair…
I’ve bought a new bed.
To make room in my bedroom I have to move a cupboard that for years has been standing in the room. I don’t have any room for it in the rest of my house so I will be throwing it out.
Curiously I opened one of the drawers to find out what was in side and found five sketch pads I’ve filled over the years.
Looking them over I remember why I have this blog.
Every few years I feel creative and buy a sketch pad and draw for a while.
But every time I get at a point where I want to draw something that is a little more challenging then everything I had done up to that point and I’m struck by self confidence problems and stop drawing.
Then after a few months/years I feel creative again and buy a sketch pad and start over again.
That’s why I have this blog.
To feel the pressure of people waiting for my next drawing to force myself to look passed problems. Problems with self confidence or any other type.
This is a drawing I did some years ago. I found it in one of the sketch pads. Although I’m sure I had some kind of idea about it when I drew it, I don’t remember what it was.
by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 15, 2009
For the last 20-30 years I’ve been talking to myself. A lot of the time even out loud. Even when I’m outside and people can hear and see me.
It’s a very annoying and distracting habbit that makes me look like some kind of madman.
Over the years I’ve tried many times to break the habbit. I’ve even been in therapy to get off of it but nothing ever seemed to help.
This morning I finally figured out what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I should do to stop doing it.
I was laying in bed thinking about the epiphany I had a few days ago. The discovery that I have two modes of looking at drawings. The mode you usually use when looking at a drawing made by some one else. In which you see shades and ridges. And the mode I tend to use when I look at my own work. Where I see a flat drawing with darker and lighter areas.
I was wondering whether the ability to switch from one mode to the other while doing a drawing is something that’s specific for autistics with a visual thinking process or whether anybody could do it.
Then it hit me.
I have two modes of thinking. Two thought process.
I have the natural (autistic) visual thought process and I have the self taught talking thought process.
I started life thinking only in pictures.
For years I didn’t feel the need to talk very much, so I didn’t. Around my 8th or 9th I could get through a week without uttering much more then 3 or 4 sentences.
But by my late teens early twenties I found ever more that I became the bud of less then nice jokes people made. And my inability to response made it all the more frightening.
So at first I spend hours thinking about what I could have answered. Later on I spend hours practicing the answers I could have given. Then I progressed to thinking about the jokes I could have made myself in response to some ones joke. Then thinking about jokes I could make without being provoked. Then….
I’m still practicing.
I’m not completely sure what it is I’m practicing right now but I’m clearly practicing something.
Now I’ve finally figured out what I’m doing I find that I’m not sure whether practicing is a bad thing.
As my life progresses and I find myself facing new challenges, it could be that it is a good thing to practice the different roles I should play in different circumstances.
But it can’t be good that I spend all my time practicing speech. I need a little balance in my live.
My visual thought process used to be very important to me. It still is.
Not thinking in pictures as much as I ones did is something I feel as a big loss.
To get it back I’ll have to work on myself. And now I understand what is going on it’s quite obvious what I have to do.
In essence I’ve been training myself for years to talk to myself. So now I have to train myself to go back to thinking in pictures.
I used to be able to imagine a kind of full color 3 dimensional video. The difference was that I was in the video instead of looking at it through a rectangular window of limited size.
I still can.
Only nowadays it takes an immeasurable amount of concentration to ban the words from my mind. So usually I tend to give up and just think in words.
But of course there’s one rule that applies to every form of training:
The more you try it, the easier it become. The more you not try it, the harder it becomes.
“Not trying” as in starting with something but not finishing it.
In essence you tell yourself that it is too hard. And after a while you start to believe that it’s too hard and stop trying.
Which means that the way to train myself to think visual is to imagine 3 dimensional full color videos. And at first it will be very hard but over time it will become easier.
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday May 13, 2009
I’ve been thinking about making a little money with this site by selling prints of my drawings. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it.
I’ve been telling myself all kinds of reasons why I haven’t yet tried it. Maybe because I don’t have enough drawings yet to sell. But I’ve got 19 drawings I could try to sell, which is more then enough to start.
Or maybe because it’s a lot of work to set up my site. But although I haven’t started yet I don’t think it’s that much work.
Or maybe because if I’m really successful it would mean that I should leave my save but boring job. But again that’s not really true. Even if I were to become successful there is nothing that would force to give up my day job.
Or could it be that I’m not certain whether I will ever have enough inspiration to make an other drawing I like enough to sell. Would it be fair to spend the next few years trying to sell the drawings I’ve made up till now.
Thinking about something Wil Wheaton said (Nothing is as safe as not taking creative risk) and experiencing how frightening it was to have the feeling that I might be talented. I finally realized what the problem is.
Making a drawing feels like making a test. Like the ones I used have to make when I was in school.
With every drawing I finish I feel satisfied for a while. Until I begin with the next one and again I feel I will be judged.
Not by you but by myself. By my conscience.
Am I really trying my best?
Not just playing around?
Am I producing a quality that is in line with the last drawing?
I find that I’m a far tougher judge then any teacher I ever had in school. But on the other hand I also feel that I should.
I feel that whether it’s about life, work or learning how to draw. What’s the point if you don’t try to push yourself to your limits
Due to my broken hip I’ve had a lot of time to think recently. One of the things I’ve found is that I’m running out of challenges in my work.
For a while I thought about going back to school. But that wouldn´t help. It was fun 20 years ago but now it would be just a repeat of an old challenge.
Although I’m not yet there I’m slowly getting round to the idea of setting myself the challenge to work towards the goal of living of off my art.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday May 4, 2009
When I started with this website, about two years ago, Steve Pavlina was just starting to earn real money. A few thousand dollars a month. There where several other big bloggers who where starting to make money and the web was buzzing with stories about how easy it would be to make a little extra money.
Although I didn’t start this blog to make money I did like the sound of those stories.
The purpose of this blog was and still is to learn how to draw. To learn how my photographic memory works. And to think about those things without having the feeling that I’m talking to myself.
But still I thought it would be nice to earn a little money with this website. So after about six months I took out an adsense account and started advertising on my blog.
And the first month I made 1 cent.
That might not sound as a big deal but it was.
It was the first time in my live that I earned money of which I actually felt it was mine.
I do have a job and of course earn money with that job, but it isn’t really mine.
Part of my salary belongs to the company that rents me my apartment, part to the gas company, part to the grocery store, part to my phone and ISP provider etc.
And even if I’m left with a little money that I can put in my savings account it still isn’t mine. Because without fail within a few months I will have some extra expenses and then my savings will disappear.
But no company had laid a claim on this first cent. It was really mine.
Of course you can’t do very much with 1 cent but I felt that if I could make one cent there would follow more.
And it did.
The second month I earned 7 cents and third something like 43.
In total I earned about $7 in the first six months.
But by then reality had set in.
Google only sends you a cheque when your total earnings reach $100. And at the rate I was going that would take me several years.
Even worse the ads that Google put on my site didn’t have anything to do with the subject of my site.
There is a little village in the Netherlands with my surname. Apparently they sell a lot of houses in that village. So I found a lot of realtor ads on my site. Not the kind I wanted to have.
So I gave up on the idea of earning money with advertising on my site and Google still owes me $7.
That would have been the end of it, if it wasn’t for my work to bring art to the masses First via this site later via StumbleUpon and nowadays via twitter.
While looking for interesting art sites to link to I come across a lot of daypainters who sell their work. And although I don’t have that much work yet, it got me of dreaming.
Wouldn’t it be nice to sell some of my drawings. Not only because it would earn my some money of my own but also because it would be something of an acknowledgment.
People telling me they like my drawings is one thing, but if they would actually buy them that would really mean something.
The only trouble is that at the moment I only have about 5 or 6 drawings of which I’m really satisfied. If I would sell them I would have none.
A few weeks ago I discovered something that isn’t actually new. Artists have been doing it for centuries but I never thought of it.
Via DeviantArt you can sell prints of your work.
But it’s a very complicated process. First people have to click on the link in the upper left corner of this page. Then they have to navigate the DeviantArt site and then I only get about 10% of the proceeds.
But it did get me thinking.
I draw on sheets of paper that are the same size as the paper that comes out of my printer. And with the quality of printers nowadays I could very easily make my own prints. Hardcover envelopes would cost a few euro and for a little more then one euro I could send it all over the world. And receiving money in a save way via Paypal isn’t that hard.
But still.
It might be a lot of fun, or not. It might only be a lot of work. I’m not sure.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks, but I couldn’t make up my mind.
The point is how much would I actually make. A few dozen euros would be nice but what could I actually do with that money?
I’m just a small town artist learning to draw. I have made a few drawings I’m really satisfied with, but I’m nowhere as famous as you would have to be to earn real money via the web. And chances are that I will never be.
I’ve never been someone who attaches great value to money, so why bother.
Last week I read something that changed everything. The theory of 1000 true fans.
It turns out that you don’t have to be famous to earn a living on the web. If you can find 1000 true fans who are willing to buy one print a year, you can make a living.
I’ve calculated it for myself. It works out to 900 true fans willing to pay me 20 euro a year to earn what I’m earning right now (including taxes). (I don’t earn very much. 
)
It probably will be a while before I start selling prints from my work on this website, but the theory of 1000 true fans finally gave me an answer something that has been bucking me ever since I started this weblog.
Common wisdom has it that readers of weblogs are an impatient crowd who never take the time to read through a whole article. Instead they like to scan the headlines. To counter that you should start an article with summary and use ample headlines.
Then there are the search engines who have there own rules concerning linking within your blog and the use of keywords. And of course you’re supposed to be constantly trying to grow the number of people that come and read your blog otherwise you wont succeed.
I’ve tried. Living up to all those rules. But I didn’t like it. It felt more like work then like play. With all those rules and regulation I had to follow I had no fun writing my weblog. And as a result I hardly wrote anything.
But going by the theory of 1000 true fans there is only one rule I have to follow. I have to be me. Writing my articles in a way that feels right to me.
The people who are interested in the things I have to say and the way I’m saying them will know to find me. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. If people stop by, read my blog and don’t like it. That just means that they are not one of the 1000 true fans.
This blog is not for them and I don’t want to adjust my blog to their taste!
by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 1, 2009
…usually we celebrate Queensday by… I wrote yesterday afternoon. Then I realized that we always celebrate Queensday in the same manner and I remove the word “usually”. Selected a few music video and art sites to tweet later that evening. Washed a few dishes and left my house to go down town for the celebrations.
On my way out of my apartment building I ran into a neighbor who asked me whether I had seen what was happening on televion, the attack on our queen. Although he was clearly very serious I had trouble not bursting into laughter because what he was telling me couldn’t be true.
Things like that don’t happen in the Netherlands.
But the driver of the bus I took into town also told me about the attack on the queen. Apparently someone drove into the crowd, killing and wounding several people and just missing the bus with the queen by a few dozen feet.
Although he didn’t know whether it was an accident or deliberate we both agreed that it had to be an accident because things like that don’t happen in the Netherlands.
By the time I reached my favorite bar the television was telling that the police was sure that this was a deliberate attack and most of the smaller towns and villages in the Netherlands where canceling their celebrations. The larger towns didn’t but mainly to prevent getting problems with the hundred of thousands of people that flog to big cities on Queensday.
Today newspapers are wondering what kind of influence this will have on the future of the Queensday celebrations and on the future of the Netherlands as a whole.
Eight years ago when the planes flew into the Twin Towers my country men and I felt relatively save. We couldn’t imagine that something like that could ever happen in the Netherlands because we don’t matter that much in the great schemes of things. And we don’t have that kind of nutjobs in the Netherlands.
But clearly we where wrong!
The narrator is talking about the route the bus is going to take when the car hits the monument. The narrator is clearly surprised about what is happening and about the people that are laying on the ground: Oh, a cars drives into the monument… what is this…? there are people laying on the ground… the royal family is shocked…. Is this an accident or deliberate…?
The journalist says ….someone hit by…. People are yelling go away, quickly go away…. …behind the fence…
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday April 30, 2009
Today is Queens Day in the Netherlands. The day we celebrate the birthday of our Queen Beatrice. Actually it isn’t her birthday it’s the birthday of the last queen before Beatrice.
Beatric’s birthday is at the 31th of January which usually a very cold and wet day. Not a day you would want to go down town and have a party.
Queens day is usually celebrated by organizing an outdoor free market and games for children and a day off work and drinking a little more then you should for adults.
Which is why I’m writing this article at 1:20 PM.
I’m planning to go down town somewhere in the next hour. Look at the games children are playing and visit my favorite bar and stay there a little longer then I should.
So chances are that I won’t be making a drawing today. 
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday April 28, 2009
Yesterday I got a comment from some art teacher telling me that I had done something wrong in my Up side down drawing. (I didn’t actually understand what he was going on about).
He told me that he had been an art teacher for 10 years and that if I had been one of his students he would have made me do the exercise again.
This was the second time. Last year I also had some art teacher writing pages of comment about boring exercises she thought I should do.
So to every art teacher reading this. Let me teach you a little lesson about teaching art:
You have it within your power to instill a love of art in your pupils.
If you do, the rest of your teachings really don’t matter. Your pupils will be engaged in art for the rest of their lives. If you might have forgotten something they will pick it up at some point.
On the other hand.
You also have it within your power to instill a hatred of art in your pupils.
If you do, it still doesn’t matter what you further teach them because they will try their hardest to forget it as soon as possible…
