What I Learned by Majoring In Art

So, I was an art major in college.

Actually, I got what was called a "dual Bachelor's," where you did the units for two Bachelor's degrees at once. My other degree was in Communication (which was mostly about film and media). Interestingly, at my school Film Studies is in the Art Department now.

This was the late 1980s. A time when, particularly at the school I attended, if you weren't studying engineering or medicine or computers, people wondered what you thought you were going to do with your degree. There was still a very strong "have the right degree, get job" mentality. Maybe you were a trust fund baby and could dabble in these nice majors because you didn't really need a job. Maybe you just weren't good enough to do those other majors.

There I was. My friends were doing problem sets and calculus, and I was covered in oil paint.

I think about four of us graduated together in Studio Art my year. Maybe five; I'd have to look.

Here's what I learned studying Studio Art:

1. How to show up for class and get assignments done

2. How to relate to the faculty and make sure I was on track to get the right units

3. How to collaborate with other students

4. How to listen and accept feedback

5. How to speak about my ideas

6. How to organize, budget for and take care of my materials

7. How to learn from other people's work

8. How to solve problems when there is no clear answer

9. Oh, and how to stretch canvas, edit film by hand, mix colors, draw nudes, etc. etc.

And, by "learned," I mean to say, I did not know these things beforehand. Anyone who went to school with me will attest that I was not a shining example of professionalism at the time. Like, that #1 "show up for class" one. I didn't start out doing that one very well.

Hm. If you look back over that list, it's got lots of useful things on it! Things that are about thinking, and problem solving, and dealing with people, and dealing with the world. Isn't that interesting? I thought this was just a flaky art degree.

My point? When you go to school, choose your major because it is something that gives you energy and inspiration. Because you will need that energy and inspiration to do the hard work of learning how to think and problem solve and deal with people and departments.

And, even in everyday life, play to your strengths. You will learn a lot about yourself this way (maybe even what you should major in). If you read better standing up, do so. If you do math better by drawing pictures of the problems, have at it. But pay attention to your strengths, those things you do when you aren't doing anything else. In my case, it was drawing. For you it might be dancing, making up number problems, writing stories, shooting baskets.

DON'T play to your strengths purely because you think that shooting baskets leads to a basketball career. Or singing leads to a career at the Met. That's way too linear.

Instead, think of your strengths as your center, and from there you can branch out into just about anything. If you make your brain comfy, it works better. Period.

I've been reading and listening a lot lately to the notion that dividing our education system into discrete subject areas runs counter to the way our mind actually works and grows. See, Ken Robinson. See, Brain Rules. I couldn't agree more.

So take it from a person who went to school on the 'wrong' side of the brain... you can spend your time banging your head (and brain) against the wall trying to be the way the system says you should be, or you can pay attention to what makes you go, and in the process actually do better at everything you put your mind to.

The Mural of The Story

At my daughter's school, they want to put a mural up on the side of the science lab. I thought I'd periodically post the progress. Murals are really fun and kind of complicated.

Here is the lab's wall, with white boxes superimposed on it. The boxes each represent a panel of plywood. Our theory is to paint one panel at a time, so they get added on and so that the "story" takes shape as we add each one.

We also want to involve as many students as possible in painting, and being able to lay a piece of wood flat on the ground means they can work on it all the way around. No ladders! No kids on ladders! This is good.

Our concept at this point is "powers of ten," starting with DNA and working our way up to the solar system. So I've spent part of today honing my DNA-drawing skills. Those are tricky little things, those DNA strands.

There is some really beautiful micro-photography out there - check out Molecular Expressions. They've got all kinds of neato images. I can get stuck there poking around very easily.

We're also looking to re-use paint and primer if we can. Give new life to other people's misguided paint color choices.

Once we get the first panel settled, I'm going to use a grid to transpose it onto the big panel. That's a big deal since we don't want some weird Gumby effect when we scale it up.

Anyway, it's a big ol' wall of potential. Hopefully soon I'll have a panel to show!

Exchanging Art

At the afterschool center where I teach, we have been working on finding ways to exchange art with other students, near and far. We recently drew a big batch of postcards, put them in an envelope and sent them off to a school in a nearby city. A few weeks later, we got back an envelope filled with cards for us! So we are in the process of admiring them - here they are on the door - and putting together the next package for them. This time we will make a big message, then cut it up into puzzle pieces so they can put it together and read our greeting.

I'm hoping this summer to put together characters with booklets that can "travel" to faraway places and eventually find their way back to the owner. I'm working out the mechanics now - things like, how to keep kids from revealing overly personal information, how to make the process really easy to understand, etc. Last time we did something involving stamps they got put all over everything like stickers. My bad for picking stamps that had pretty pictures on them. Oops.

Carrot and Turnip People

This morning, my husband started scribbling on the newspaper with a pencil. Of course, as soon as he saw me watching, he stopped. You see, he's one of those Grownups Who Does Not Draw. Yes, right here under the same roof! It's like, a National Geographic special where the camera crew didn't even have to leave the building to get the shot of the rare species.

So, I made a request for one of his Carrot People. He's been drawing these for as long as I have known him, which is a pretty long time.

Just look at these! It's a carrot and a turnip. They have so much personality! I happen to really like the person who drew them, but they have a unique look. Like, where he puts the face on the carrot, down low like that. He's always drawn them that way.

People Who Do Not Draw make the greatest drawings! They are so full of personality. Without even trying.

I just love people's drawings.

Reasons Not To Draw

"I can't draw."

Let's think about that. What does that mean, exactly?

Are you unclear about what the different ends of the pencil are for? Do you not ever have paper handy? Really, the very next person you encounter today can quickly show you these things.

I think what that actually means is,
"I can't draw the way I think people think I should be able to draw."

Therefore, whatever gets drawn is going to be, well, bad.

So, what does "bad" mean?

It means, it doesn't look right. It's not accurate. It's not art. It's ugly and malformed. It's messy. It's not whatever you had visualized in your head when you started. It's the wrong color. It's smudged. It's stupid-looking. It's in the wrong place on the paper. It's the wrong size. It's worse than what your kids can do. On some absolute scale in the universe, it is inferior. Bad.

I teach these classes, called Jams, where kids and grownups draw together. The point of the classes is to get people drawing together they way they might read together, getting all the benefits of drawing and having a good time in the process. We play games, we make collaborative drawings, and there is a lot of laughing and silliness.

Here's the thing: Making marks is healthy for your brain. And, it is really really basic to who we are. Which I think is why we are so judgmental. Humans tend to be visual creatures when we have the chance, so we're pretty discerning. We can tell that the lighting isn't quite right or the person's arms are too long. We may not know how to fix it, but we know there's a problem.

I love when the grownups in my classes get to laughing at what they are drawing. It's not a derisive, "that sucks" kind of laughter, it's just laughing because the drawing is funny. The ideas in it are funny. The process is funny.

I talk a lot more about this in "How to Draw Nothing:"

How To Draw Nothing

View more presentations from betsystreeter.

If we can get away from the idea that we have to draw Something, we can all benefit from making drawings - minus the whole "I can't draw" thing. And in the process, show kids that it's okay to mess around and be silly and have ideas that don't necessarily fit onto the standardized test.

Cartooning Jams and Solar Toys

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hanging out with about 80 people of all ages, 40 at a time, at two different libraries. We were holding Cartooning Jams, where kids and grownups get together and make drawings and characters and flippies (like the Captain Underpants Flip-O-Rama) and more. Both classes were great fun and very noisy and silly.

After the second class, I got to hang out a bit with Brad, an 86-year-old gentleman who has filled the back of his Honda Insight with solar-powered toys.

Here's a picture of the trunk of his car. The blue thing is one of those M&M characters, with a spinning thing on top of his head. It was partly cloudy, so every time the sun would come out or hit something new things would start moving.



I even took a super-short movie so you can see it all moving. People would stop and stare at all this cool shiny solar stuff. I think folks at the library are quite familiar with Brad. Brad is determined to educate as many kids as possible about solar energy. He even has a little sun pin fastened to the front of his baseball cap.



This has me thinking about trying to make a solar-powered zoetrope. Brad showed me how the little photovoltaic cells hook up to motors and make things go. Just think - if you made a zoetrope (cylinder with slits that plays a movie when it spins) and hooked it up to a cell, you could play a solar-powered movie! Hmmm.

Anyway thanks Brad for showing me all your cool inventions, and thanks everybody for coming to the Jams. Every class is new and different territory, and I so enjoy meeting everyone.

More Fun at the Cartoon Art Museum, Plus Bonus Game Tip

Last Saturday, we held another "How to Draw with Your Kid / How to Draw with Your Grownup" class at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. There was such a huge range of personalities apparent right from the start of class! We did collaborative drawing (or "drawing jams"), made up lists of words and used them to create characters, did some super-fast animation, and finally talked about how to make up your own board game.

During the board game part, as I was lamenting the need for dice or a spinner, a couple of the kids let me know there's a simple way to make a spinner with just paper, a pencil, and a paperclip. Now, maybe everyone else in the world knows this but me, but for me it was a cool new trick. So I'll share it here.

You take a piece of paper, and draw a circle on it. Then, put numbers around it, like a pie. Then, put a pencil, tip down, on the point in the center. Now, lift up the pencil, and put a paperclip down so the pencil will stick through one end of it when you stick it back down. That's your spinner. Now, while holding the pencil upright, you just flick the paperclip in a circle and see what number it lands on. Voila.

And here I had all these elaborate schemes for making a deck of number cards, or stealing dice from other games in your home (leading to inevitable "game piece creep"), and what have you.

I'll be at two libraries in Rohnert Park and Petaluma tomorrow, doing more grownup/kid drawing jams. And now I can tell them how to make a spinner. Whee!

Egg Wars?

What is it about eggs that makes us want to make them into characters? Maybe it's just me, since I draw The Ipps. But, there's Humpty Dumpty too, and now there's my son's re-interpretation of his Easter eggs from preschool into a Star Wars-like drama.

Here you see a tower, with doors and windows at the bottom. The basket has been turned into a jail, from which certain characters must be rescued.



A Sharpie has been used to add important details, like a light saber and Obi Wan's beard. I think the rescue was successful.



The eggs were hard-boiled, but after a day away from any sort of fridge, the Star Wars eggs had to be retired in the afternoon. But they did have some good adventures in the meantime.

I love the way an object can take on so many different guises when a child gets a hold of it. When we grow up, we allow less and less for interpretation - it's an egg, darnit. It's a box. When a kid sees these things, it's an egg and a box but it's also a tower, a jail, and some Star Wars characters.

So... may the Easter Bunny be with you?

Video Games are WAY More Passive Than TV.

Don't let that controller with the buttons on it fool you.

In the industry, games are often referred to as "interactive entertainment." This makes them sound like this great place where you go do lots of things.

I would argue that it's just the opposite.

You see, when a bunch of people see a movie or play or TV show, they are just sitting there. Not very interactive, is it? But the thing is, each of those people is seeing and hearing and feeling something slightly different. They may remember certain lines or characters. They may relate what they are seeing to another story or life experience that they are familiar with.

In other words, there is still infinite room for everyone's imagination and memories and ideas.

In a video game, you are subject to an extensive set of rules created by someone else. Your choices are all pre-determined. This is necessary, because without controls the game would break. I don't care how complicated it is, somebody had to program it.

Even if you get an avatar, your choices there are going to be limited in some way.

And, of course, to advance in a game there are predetermined things you have to do. They may be very elaborate, they may be time-consuming, but they are still pre-determined. Again, this is necessary to keep the game from breaking.

I know this because I used to work in the game industry, and I have played my share of games too. Everything from Atari on up. So I'm not just sitting here on the couch lobbing pixels. I know what's under the hood, so to speak.

You would think that more "sophisticated" entertainment would give the consumer more freedom, not less. But what is freeing about ever-more-realistic renderings of the reflections off of a football helmet? That's realism, not freedom.

Now, if you love football games, or golf games, or shoot-em-ups, or RPGs, or multiplayer stuff, or racing, or whatever, great. Lots of people do, it's a huge industry.

Just remember, it's actually more passive than your TV. So if you spend time playing games, it's that much more important to balance that time with getting outside and digging some dirt. Or drawing with melty crayons. Or throwing a real ball. Or anything that doesn't involve pixels.

More at Burton High School

We (me along with Katina Papson from World Savvy) did a second session with Eric Chow's students at Burton High in San Francisco recently (I wrote about the first session here), this time with the goal of getting some of their own imagery going that could go into their comics. Katina and I sneaked in before lunch and looked over some of the students' essays about their immigration experiences (these students are all recent immigrants and English learners) and sketched out some ideas. Then, during lunch, we talked with the students - first one half of the class, then the other half.



Look, I waved my arms around so much you can't see them!

That's Katina in the background, the fabulous person from World Savvy who contacted me about the "Immigration and Identity" project in the first place. She develops a ton of curriculum and runs workshops and is generally all over it.



I did a lot of this sort of gesture - which I think means, "What does your story look like to you?" I encouraged them to exaggerate, to re-interpret, draw things as they appeared in their own feelings. If the airplane that took you to another country looked like a monster, draw it that way. If the new school made you feel the size of an ant, draw it that way. If you had mixed feelings leaving one family to go live with another, maybe split your face in two and show both.

The great thing was, a lot of the students immediately started drawing really specific images that only they could come up with. One had an airplane going from Thailand to the U.S., with little dollar signs all over America. In another, the airplanes and cars had teeth. Another showed the airplane, with little magnified views of what he did on the flight (sleeping and eating). I loved how quickly the images took shape. I can't wait to see how these come out.