Cup of Coffee

Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to be somebody who draws things. For good portions of my life I have been able to fulfill this ambition. While in elementary school and middle school I created drawings almost every day of my life – mostly drawings of battleships, warplanes and military vehicles as well as plans of Robinson Crusoe's Island. I did not draw for virtually all of my six years at boarding school but then started again when I commenced my architectural education. By the late 70s I was drawing again almost every day – this time on the working drawings for renovating old buildings in London. In the late 80s and 90s I was drawing again, this time using AutoCAD to generate digital drawings. Since leaving Autodesk in 1998 I have done very little drawing – for a variety of reasons.

I refuse to draw on paper. It is an archaic medium and too much of a bother. I want to be able to produce many drawings, be able to do so on almost any device I happen to have around. I want people to access those drawings easily and so I need to be able to publish them on the web without much trouble.

Another aspect as to why I had have not been going recently is that drawing can take a lot of time. A good artist can take several hours or more to produce even a small drawing. This drives me up the wall. I want my drawing and I want it now. Five minutes should be more than enough time to produce the image that I want.

Over the years I have had several graphics tablets connected to computers. These allow you to draw with a stylus and have the drawings appear on the computer screen. Each of these tablets has issues. They don't work with certain programs. The line quality is not very good. They're big and bulky. My latest tablet is a Wacom.com Bamboo tablet that I've had for about a year. I made a few drawings with it when it first arrived, but gave up on it fairly soon. I've recently pulled it out again, updated drivers and started using it with a program called Evernote. And also with the drawing program in Google Docs.

It turns out with Google Docs that I can create a drawing quite rapidly and publish it on WordPress or Blogger with a minimum of keystrokes. The image of the coffee cup above was the first image I produced in Google Docs this time around. The process seems to be easy enough that I may have some chance of continuing to create drawings on an ongoing basis.

My goal would be to produce a little sketch everyday - a very simple drawing with perhaps 10 or fewer lines that depicts a real or imaginary object.

Why do I feel the need to do draw? Good question. Part of the answer is that an educated person should be able to communicate their thoughts visually when that a visual representation is the most effective and appropriate way of doing so.