That time a retired illustrator showed me his old sketchbooks

I was at a coffee shop downtown last Tuesday and this older guy saw me scrolling through AI art prompts on my phone. He pulled out a 30 year old sketchbook full of margin notes and said 'this is how I learned composition, one bad drawing at a time.' Made me wonder if we lose something when we skip the messy part of creating. Anyone else ever talk to someone from the pre-digital era about this stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

karenb971mo ago

Those margin notes sound way more valuable than any AI prompt. The messy part is probably where the real learning happens.

nelson.vera1mo ago

My uncle used to scribble all over his cookbooks, like little notes next to recipes about what went wrong or right. One time he wrote "add more garlic, trust me" next to a tomato sauce recipe, and I swear that stuff was the best I've ever had. But then there's the margarine incident of 2018 where he tried to substitute it for butter in a cookie recipe and the notes got all frantic like "NO NEVER AGAIN". So yeah, I get what you mean about the messy parts being where the real stuff happens. It's like those margin notes are a whole conversation with yourself about what you actually learned.

pat7811mo ago

The process itself is where you figure things out though, right? @karenb97 those notes mean more because they came from messing up. A prompt can't teach you that "never again" feeling.