Approach

My general approach is to settle on an idea for anywhere from a week to a month and to push that idea in different directions. I usually try to pose a problem “how would I attach things to the contour of a body as it moves?”, “how would I make this blob turn into a letter”, and the sketches are my attempt at solution. Sometimes the sketches show me working through the idea, sometimes they push what can happen with the solution.

The sketches are the opposite of work to me, so I try to be totally un-work like. I don’t use github, I don’t keep code clean, I just make and record without thinking very carefully about anything. I sketch up until the point I think it’s interesting, record it, post it and clock out. It’s the opposite of how I approach commercial work. When I sketch I want to work as messy and mindlessly as possible — I don’t plan, I just see where the wind blows.

I try to work for about 30 minutes on a sketch. It doesn’t always work that way, but in general I try to keep the time involvement as minimal as possible — I have other work to do, etc and I want this to be for fun more than anything else. Sometimes if I have 15 minutes free here or there, I might open up the last sketch again and try to make a variation of push things in a different direction. With shaders, small changes can have a huge effect, so I often times would change even just a few variables and have a new sketch. Lately I’ve taken to using instagram stories and doing screen recording as I work as a way of sharing those different changes.

Folks ask me if I open source this work. At the moment, I haven’t, mostly because these sketches feel like they are in early states and I don’t yet know what they will become. However, when people ask technical questions, I do my best to answer them and explain exactly what I am doing and I also make myself available once a week for open office hours. I am still honestly struggling with this — I am a strong believer in open source but I don’t know the best way to integrate this into sketching without it changing the nature of what I do or me feeling un-afraid to share ideas I don’t fully understand yet. It’s an open question and as I head into 2017 I may revisit this.

Once I post a sketch, I find it’s useful to monitor how it was received. I am curious about the like to view ratio, the comments people leave and I find it helps gauge how other people see my work. It’s interesting to see when I have an idea that I really love that doesn’t connect with people or when there’s something people pick up on that I don’t think as highly of. A lot of times, as an artist, I feel like we’re struggling to find our frequencies and what resonates with the frequencies of the world. This act of sketching is a kind of tuning of these frequencies, trying things that are more harmonious, trying things which are more discordant and generally getting a feel for how others see your work.

These sketches are like diary entries. When I think back to a sketch, I sometimes remember the specific day, where I was, what the temperature was like, what I was thinking about at the time. I get nostalgic just poking through them. They mark my moods and capture all kinds of things in them — it’s really surprising.

Finally, I had a set of simple rules: