Posts tagged as:

learning

Stupid in America

by Henk ter Heide on Friday September 24, 2010

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9069323583494421392
In the Netherlands it costs about 5000 euro a year to teach children to read (and write). Nowadays by the time they’re eighteen 99% can read.

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Here and now

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 14, 2009

Sometimes it helps to look at something from a different perspective.

For the last 30 odd years I’ve been trying to get rid of my (at times) very annoying habit of talking to myself.
Not only by will power but also by trying to figure out why I did it and what the purpose might be.
At times I succeeded to not talk to my self for a few hours. But it always came back.

A few weeks ago my manager called me stubborn behind my back. Very loudly behind my back.
I didn’t mined that much because being called stubborn is only one mans judgment.
Being strong willed and being stubborn is actually the same thing. Both means that you have the power to overcome obstacles you find on your way. In the case of stubborn the person setting those obstacles will call you stubborn. (Usually because he doesn’t agree with the way you live your life.)

But thinking about it a little longer I realized that there is a difference in being strong willed and being stubborn. But the difference isn’t in your actions but in the way you present yourself.
A strong willed person will be very calm and composed. Where as a stubborn person is loud and argumentative.

I act stubborn. And I do that because I always are afraid because of all those people criticizing me.
That is.
When I thought about it I realized that there is actually nobody criticizing me. Except in my mind.

A few days ago I realized that I am constantly imagining people who are criticizing me. And I’m constantly defending myself from those imaginable people.
All those imaginable people who are criticizing me frighten me a lot. So why would I do that?

This morning I finally figured it out.
Because of my visual thinking process I can imagine myself somewhere else then I’m right now. That other place feels very real. Actually far more real then the place where I am right now.

So for instance, at the moment bicycling is fairly frightening because of the fact that I fell and broke my hip last year. At the moment I’m again learning how to keep balance.
When I cycling to work I feel very scared. So I imagine that I’m in the office of my manager being chewed out for something I did wrong.
That feels so real that I don’t feel the fear from cycling anymore.
But of course I have to imagine something my manager could be angry about and get frightened of that imaginary problem.
In the end that gets me more frightened that just concentrating on cycling.

So you might ask why did I ever learn a trick that made me more frightened then I would have been just going about my way.
And the answer is that I didn’t.
Originally I would imagine someplace nice I could visit if I wanted to flee reality. That worked perfectly for years. It only had one big drawback namely that it was very distracting.
I remember days passing without me. At 10 AM I would flee reality and next it would be 11 PM and apparently I just sat there for hours on end.

So about 20 years ago I tried to loose that habit but because I didn’t understand why I did it I only replaced it by an other habit that wasn’t as distracting but far more annoying.

So now I know.

This morning I realized that I should concentrate on reality. On living in the here and the now.
Today, for the first time in my life, I had a day without talking to myself and without fleeing reality.
It felt both very nice and as though I was doing some very heavy lifting.

Clearly this isn’t something that will just go on it’s own. I’ll have to fight for it.
But since it’s also clear that fleeing reality causes more fear then it curbs. And not fleeing reality actually helps against the anxiety attics I’m optimistic.

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The journey

by Henk ter Heide on Sunday July 19, 2009

Because I’m still walking with a crutch, because I broke my hip last year November, I can’t cycle.
I hate it. It’s to slow.
And of course I can’t walk very far. So I take the bus a lot.
I don’t like the bus either. Not only because it takes much more time to reach down town by bus then by bike. But also because it doesn’t take me to the place were I want to go.
So I have to walk even more.

On holidays I’ve walked through forests and past lakes and hated it. As always I felt that I was going to slow.
Although I like being in nature and looking at the beautiful trees or the water. I always feel that there should be better mode of transport.
I’d much rather climb into my Porse and race through the forest.

I just started a new doodle. Although it’s not really a quick sketch. This is probably going to be a very nice drawing. But it is going to take me a few days to finish it.

Just after starting it. Not yet knowing what it was going to be. I realized something about drawing.
I’ve never thought about what it is that I like about drawing. Am I interested in the process or in the result.
Do I draw because I want to reach a certain destination or because I like the journey.

Thinking about that I realized that I am wrong. I do like walking through nature and having a laugh with friends. I just never recognized the feeling.

I do like the feeling of the pencil sliding across the paper. I do like to watch and see how the white is slowly eaten by the color.
I don’t like the color selection.
But am finding that it really doesn’t matter that much. Whether I take a long time to decide which color to take or go by instinct. In the end I usually like the result.

I also like the result.
But not so much that I’m willing to speed through a drawing. And give up on the joy of drawing it first.

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Lessons I learned while buying fish and chips

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.

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How to become an expert at any skill

by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday December 17, 2008

Follow three rules and become an expert on any skill you love.

I had a discussion with my counselor about the whole talent thing. How I had decided to spent much more time on drawing (and less time on other things) because I think that will give me a change to become an expert.
She didn’t agree. She thinks that talent does matter. She played a musical instrument in her teens. Although she practiced for years she never got very good.

Thinking about that I realized that she had a point.
My mother bought her piano in 1968 when we moved to Waddinxveen. When she died in 1989 she had been practicing for more then 20 years, strictly one hour a day.
But she never got any better then mediocre.

So how is this possible?
Why is it that some people practice for 10,000 hours and become world class artists and others practice for well over 10,000 hours and never get to be more the mediocre.
Is it talent?
I hope not.
Because if it’s talent I’m screwed. The last one and a half year have shown that I have no drawing talent what so ever.

A few years ago I bought a harmonica. It seemed like a fun instrument to play. It also seemed a fairly easy instrument to master even for someone with no musical talent.
But it turned out to be a very difficult instrument.
I had bought a few books on musical theory but none of them made any sense to me. And how ever hard I tried I never was able to blow a single note.
After a few months I gave up and threw everything out.

A few months ago my interest was rekindled by one of the videos Youtube recommended. I researched harmonicas on the Net and found a wealth of information on the kind of instrument you should start with and a lot of free music and some instructional videos on Youtube.
A nice read but I did nothing with it and wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for the fact that I broke my hip and can’t leave my house for the next three months.

Getting rather bored I ordered a harmonica via the Internet and started practicing.
This time I found that the level of skill you can reach not only depends on your talent. It’s also depended on the kind of information you can get.
Thanks to the instructional videos I found I figured out how to blow a single note. And although I can only blow single notes for about 10 minutes it’s clear that I’ll get better with more practice.

But that’s the harmonica. An instrument that is played by hardly anyone in the Netherlands. And since hardly anyone plays it you can’t get much information on the instrument. But there are loads of people who draw. There are loads of good books on the subject and I have been researching the web since I started.
So does my lack of progress with drawing mean that I don’t have what it takes or is there something else I should take into consideration.
If I’d ask this question a week ago I would have answered that I suffer from a lack of talent. But this week I started with something I’ve never done before. I started with copying the work of other artists.
In doing so I figured something out.

Until now I’ve always tried to draw the pictures in my mind. Since that is the purpose of of this blog I never thought anything of it. Actually the only reason why I started with copying was because I ran out of subjects to draw but still wanted to draw something. Anything.
But in doing so I found that I had to push my self to get better results.
When I draw a picture from memory I’m the only one who know how the original picture looks. And since to me photographs, painting and drawing always look different from each other I’m easily satisfied.
But now everybody is going to get to see both the original painting and my copy of it.
I can no longer put up with the fact that there are hues missing in my drawing box. I can’t get away with adapting the drawing to my drawing box. I have to mix new colors to adapt my drawing box to the picture.

So in doing this drawing I’m learning more then I’ve learned in the last one and a half year.

I think that’s also the reason why my mother never got any better. Yes she did practice for 20,000 hours, but most of that time was spent repeating tunes she already knew by heart. She hardly ever tried new tunes.
By contrast. I’m finding that when I stretch myself and try something new I also get to practice the old skills.

If you want to be an expert at a skill you’ll need three things.

  • You need the right kind of information.
    If you don’t understand what you’re supposed to do, find an other book, website or teacher.
  • You need to practice 7 to 14 hours a week. Which means that you really need to love this. Otherwise you can get good but you’ll never be an expert.
  • You need to stretch yourself. Spent the majority of your time practicing new things.
    It is important to practice the skills you already know. But to become an expert you’ll have to try and learn everything there is.

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Going for imperfection

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday August 19, 2008

The advantage and disadvantage of drawing less perfect.

My experiment yesterday to draw while tired taught me an important lesson: Either the lines are perfect or the overall picture is perfect. Never both of them.

In trying to get every line perfect you invest a lot of time and effort. So much so that you will never say something like “OK, now I know what I want, lets start over”.
You can’t after investing all that energy.

I’ve started my drawing again and very soon found why I’ve never tried this before.
There is something very frightening about drawing and going for imperfection intensifies that fear. Even if you have a photographic memory and a visual thinking process, like I have, you don’t exactly know what you are going to draw until you’ve finished your drawing.
You never know whether you’ve drawn something you like until you’ve finished the drawing.
Going for imperfection feels as though you’re setting yourself up to fail.
And it’s quite possible that you are going to fail.

Actually it’s almost certain that you’re going to fail since this is only a sketch.
If you find that you like what you’ve drawn you will have to start over to make it a genuine drawing.

As scary as this way of drawing is, in this case it’s also more educational then trying to get every every line just right.
This time I started out with a kind of framework by drawing a line of squares from the down left corner to the upper right corner. The idea is that the steps in the upper right corner are higher.
Which is fine but in drawing the rest of the steps I find that they don’t exactly fit. I have to figure the logic of the drawing out the make it fit.
Since the point of this drawing is to learn to understand perspective it’s a good thing I have to think about it.

Stairway to haven
Stairway to haven

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How to learn to (cross) hatch

by Henk ter Heide on Thursday February 28, 2008

Rethinking my method of learning how to (cross) hatch.

This morning I remembered reading a site about improving your handwriting. The site advised to go back to basics and start over with practicing to draw a hundred A’s, a hundred B’s etc. just like the way you did it in school when you first where taught how to write.
I never tried it because nowadays I hardly use any handwriting.
But it would be a good way of practicing hatching. Drawing a lot of horizontal lines instead of filling a grid with hatched lines and using more time turning the paper then actually hatching.

Thinking about method also gave me a clear picture on the level of skill I should aim for.
Until now I thought it would be sufficient if I learned to draw the lines the right length but it isn’t. I should get enough skill to (cross) hatch with the same ease as with which I’m type this article. (Cross)hatching lines should become as easy as touch typing.

I’ve been told that people with autism have problems learning new skills because we take more time to automate a skill. Personally I’ve always found that to be a big advantage. I never have the problem that I have to unlearn some skill because I learned it the wrong way the first time round.
But if you have the bad luck of not being autistic then this is a time to pay close attention to what you are doing.

Ink hatching 2
Ink hatching 2

There isn’t a right and a wrong way to (cross) hatching as long as you get the job done, but there is an easy and a not so easy way. The problem being that what is easy for me doesn’t necessary have to be the easiest way for you. you’ll have to experiment a little.
I found that there are a few things you can vary to make hatching easier:

  • The length of the line. (I’ve found that practicing hatching becomes much easier if you start with shorter lines.)
  • Do you work towards your (drawing) hand or away from it. (I’ve found that for me it’s easier to work away from my hand even though that means that my pencil partially covers my work.)
  • In what direction do you draw. Upward or downward. (I started drawing downward but after gaining some experience I use both.)
  • The angle of the paper. (I’m scanning this practice drawing in the angle I drew it. I’m right handed.)
  • Drawing speed. (I found that drawing faster made it easier do draw straight lines. Which might mean that if you want to draw curved lines it could be easier to draw slower.)
  • How much pressure do you put on the pencil. (The type of pencil you use has some influence on this, but I found that less pressure is easier.)

(Oh, the fun of writing an English blog if English isn’t you mother tongue:
Doubting whether cross hashing is one word or two word I looked it up in my dictionary and couldn’t find it. So I went on searching the word on Google, like I always do when my dictionary can’t help me.
Only this time I found that the word isn’t (cross) hashing but (cross) hatching. Sadly my spell checker didn’t save my from this embarrassment because “hash” is also an English word. Only thing is that it has nothing to do with drawing.
I’ve used the word hashing both in a few articles and in a few titles. I can’t change titles without breaking links that I have set up from other sites to these articles. I could change the spelling within the articles but I’ve discovered that if I do that people who follow this site via my rss feed get these articles again.
:( )

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Computer teaches life lesson

by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday September 25, 2007

A computer game teaches me to always play my “A” game even when the odds are stacked against me.

Practice, practice, practice. Every teacher and every coach will tell you that is the only way to learn skills. To practice and to learn them in the right order.

When you want to learn to tennis you’ll start with learning the forehand. When you’ve mastered that you’ll go on with the backhand and then the serve.

I don’t know what comes next because I never got that far.
When I started with the backhand I forgot the forehand. My coach thought I was faking and bullied me until I stopped with tennis.

Ten years after that I started fencing and again I wasn’t very good at it. In fact for six years I was the worst fencer of the club. But although we had a few very good fencer the majority of the members of the club just wanted to socialize.
I taught a number of beginning fencers the basics and everybody liked me for doing that.

Over the last year I’ve learned that forgetting skills after I’ve learned them is an intricate part of having autism.
This means that there always is a drawback in learning a new skill. I will forget a few skills in the process. Although they will come back I will forget them again the next time I learn a new skill.
Sometimes I have a hard time rembering what I liked about something when I only get worse while I practice and practice.

Two years ago I found a new hobby. Driving a car in simulation games. Games like Colin McCrea Rally (CMR) and Midnight Club.
In real live I don’t drive because I’ve problems observating traffic. Especially when I’m tired my field of vision become very narrow. So it’s very nice to drive in a game.

Off course I’m not very good at it. I loose most of my races. But what the hack. It’s just a computer game.

Two weeks ago I decided it was time for a change of scenery and I bought Colin McCrea Dirt.
Apart from a little problem with the controls CM Dirt is much better then CMR. It only has one problem.
In CMR you could play all the races. Even if you’ve lost you could go on with the next. In CM Dirt they changed that. With every race you win, you collect points and money. New races are only unlocked when you have enough points. So you have to win.

Playing as a rookie I found that there where enough races easy enough to win some points and unlock a few races. none of the new race where easy enough to win enough points. So there was nothing I could do then start again with some of the races I had lost. With a lot of luck and a little skill I won some.

After winning 15% of the races the program developed a problem. I lost the savegames file and had to start over.
The second round wasn’t as much fun. Again I had to drive races I had won easily, races I had won with a lot of effort and races I didn’t win the first time.

Last Sunday being bored I figured I might as well play a little Dirt.
When I started the game asked me whether I wanted to continue the Japanese race. I’d rather not but if you retire the game keeps bullying you (“Nobody likes quitters”) so I did and lost. The race in Japan is very difficult. A lot of tight turn and slippery roads make it almost impossible. I finished 20th on a field of 20.

After loosing a few more races I had to start all over again. Again the race in the UK.
This race is on gravel with a few very long straights and a few very difficult turns and I always finish last.
Since I always loose I thought that I might as well learn a new skill: Breaking with my left foot.
Using both my feet would no doubt mean that I would forget to steer and drive off the road. But I already do, so it really didn’t matter.

The big difficulty with steering in Dirt is that it is almost impossible to drive straight. The car keeps swaying. Which makes it very difficult to get around corners. Breaking makes matter worse.
The alternative, driving very slowly on the straights, makes for a very boring game and you always loose.

Almost 30 minutes after I started I was back at the Japanese race. By that time I was getting tired and my concentration was fading fast. So I decided to just go for it. I would probably end up in a ravine and loose but I would loose anyway.

The race in Japan starts out quite easy. A few long straights and slight turns.
I still was to slow. At the first quarter of the race I was already falling behind. I didn’t have time to look at the time announchment but the label was red instead of green.
In the second quarter of the race the pace picked up. More turns and sharper turns made the race a little harder. Again the time label was red.

In the third quarter I realized that the car had a natural rhythm to it’s swaying. If I only could think of a way to get the natural rhythm inline with the turns I had to make, I would be saved.
But in the middle of the race I had no time to think about it. I just had to go on.
Soon after that I felt that I lost control of the car. Left, right, left, right… The car almost hit a tree, the fence, the wall. Almost.

I don’t remember seeing the label of the third time announcement.

After a difficult left and right turn I finally see the finish. The last few hundred yard I battle with the controls. Then I fly over the finish.
I’ve won.
With 0.21 seconds to spair.

If there ever was a time that the odds where stacked against me. This was it.

  • Driving a race I have never won.
  • Being tired and with fading concentration.
  • Just having started to learn a new skill.
  • Being sure that I would forget some other skill.
  • Discovering a skill I’d have to learn while I’m in the midst of a race.

By all accounts I should have lost. But doing the best job I could I won.

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Knowledge versus skills (Sketch: Tree)

by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 24, 2007

Or why having a photographic memory seems to be a disadvantage when you’re learning how to draw.

Over the last two years I’ve learned how to play poker. I won’t say that I’m the worlds best poker player but I can hold my own in free games.

Two years ago I saw something about poker sites on the telly. I’ve always been very bad in card game. But I was curious as to how poker would be played on line. I went to have a look and it turned out to be very easy… to join the game.

At first I had no idea of what I was doing. But I only had to push a few buttons and the software took care of the rest.
After a few days I found that I actually won some times. Most of the time I lost but sometimes I won.

My interest was peeked and I used the information on the poker site to find out what the rules of the game where. What card combinations would give me a fair change of winning and which card combinations always lost. After that I won some more. Or maybe I should say I lost less.

Over the last year my skills improved and my winnings improved until they topped off a few months ago.
I could go on improving my skills. But I would have to study and play a lot. I’m choosing to spend more time drawing and blogging.

The point is that I started with no expectations. When I found that this was something that I could do I improved my knowledge.
From having more knowledge and spending a lot of time at it, I gained skills and my game improved.

With drawing it’s a completely different story. Because of my photographic memory I know everything there is to know about drawing. For every picture I want to draw ten or twenty paintings, photographs and drawings pop into my mind before I’ve even sat down.
And since I can see these pictures in my mind I expected that it would be very easy to draw them. It isn’t.  I don’t have the skills.

I’m finding that getting skills doesn’t work the same for me as what I see in other people (children).
Children usually start out with a very simple picture and add stuff until it looks like something. Since they don’t have any expectations of the end result anything goes.

I’ve tried that but for some reason it doesn’t work.
Could be because of all the pictures in my mind. Could be that there is some other reason. I’ll just have to figure it out.

For now. Here are the trees I’ve been promising.
They don’t look like the picture in my mind. Which means that I’m not sure whether I should be proud that I’ve put something on paper. Or that I should be disappointed because of the lack of quality of the drawing.

Tree 7
Tree 7

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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
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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