#9: Slow Shoegazing
Chill out with contour drawing.
Instructions
Get a shoe(s) to draw and put on some slow music.
Put your pencil/marker tip on the paper.
As you trace the shoe(s) with your eyes, sync up the marker on the paper.
Go slowly! Continue without lifting the marker.
Try it again without looking at the paper as you draw. It may get weird.
Make small contour drawings of details from your first drawings.
Image: Yes, I have Minions flip-flops. Here are drawings of them.
How the huh?
Contour drawing is one of my all-time favorite techniques. It’s a great way to slow down the eye and warm up when drawing. It also makes some really weird shapes when you do “blind” contour drawings of drawing without looking at the page. The two people usually credited with the technique have different opinions on why it works:
(Kimon) Nicolaïdes instructs students to keep the belief that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. He suggested that the technique improves students' drawings because it causes students to use both senses of sight and touch. (Betty) Edwards suggests that pure contour drawing creates a shift from left mode to right mode thinking. The left mode of the brain rejects meticulous, complex perception of spatial and relational information, consequently permitting the right brain to take over. … it helps students to draw more realistically, rather than relying on their memorized drawing symbols.
Corita Kent and Jan Steward also break it down well:
“One of the great values of contour drawing is that it makes it very difficult to be judgmental about your work. Contour drawing helps you see things and let you intuition make choices.
This kind of drawing must be done very slowly.
Drawings done in this way are different from drawings done with the interruptions of back-and-forth eye movements, and the kind of visual hairsplitting that comes from criticism of a work in progress. Creating and analyzing are different processes and can’t be done at the same time. Contour drawings often have a vitality lacking in works that are too carefully considered or fussed over.
… Don’t worry about skill. The drawing will have life.”
Though Jason Polan didn’t technically do contour drawing solely, he had the same looseness and intuition in his quicker drawings for Every Person in New York and often he’d be looking quite intensely while ignoring the page. It’s legitimately a highlight of my life that I got into it!
Listening to music while doing this type of drawing encourages the switching off of Judgment Mode. Which brings me to bleep-bloop music and being hunched over a laptop.
The Sidebar — How I Ended Up with Terrible Taste in Music
As a kid in Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time in the car with my parents going on errands. Since it was pre-smartphone and pre-CD, we listened to a lot of terrestrial radio while stuck in traffic.
My mother liked some music from her younger years like Dean Martin, but had very little interest in current music—or rather, was busy trying to work full-time, maintain a family including aging parents, volunteering at church, and generally just DEALING. Thanks for nothing, Ronald Reagan. As a young person I was somewhat oblivious to those responsibilities and couldn’t imagine not caring deeply about music. Turns out, music is great for a growing brain.
Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development—and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important—especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments).
— Mark Joseph Stern, “Neural Nostalgia”, Slate
As such, when my Mom was driving she’d often turn to 94.7, “The Wave”, which at the time was playing a bland beige mix of “smooth jazz”. Apparently when they launched, station management “referred to The Wave as a ‘mood service’. The mood is well captured in their logo, as well as the sing-song call letters with ocean sounds behind it.
Image: 94.7 The Wave’s horrible 90s logo
Listen to a sampling here. To a young person, that mood was SUPER-BARF.
I’m now roughly the age my mother was at the time. I don’t love music the same way I did, and years will rush by where I’m completely unaware of anything on the charts, or in mixtape culture, or really any new music. I no longer go to rap concerts here in New York, or any event where I have to stand for long stretches, because #old. I don’t even have a Spotify account.
So how did I move from loving the screech of 40 guitar tracks on a Smashing Pumpkins song and buying bootleg CDs on the subway of all the releases from the Soulquarians (the J Dilla Donuts 33 ⅓ book is tremendous), to truly loving that Brian Eno album designed for airports?
How did I get so musically flabby?!
I, like many people who had office jobs, tried to find music that could induce focus and limit distraction, landing with ambient and lo-fi hip-hop on YouTube.
It’s not technically shoegaze, but it’s at least a quieter cousin. I got into Tycho (featured in a great episode of Song Exploder), have recently fallen into a wonderful hole of the Nine Inch Nails instrumental albums, and had YouTube (correctly!) recommend a harp cover of an Aphex Twin song for me.
SO GOOD.
My brothers and I used to quote the Simpsons bit about how Marge thought that “music is none of my business” and then we’d laugh about how our mother was the same way and so very uncool.
In the end the contours of time have changed me, and it turns out that—*GASP*—I have turned into my mother, listening to acoustic wallpaper. I am not cool. Fine by me.
Let me have my bleep-bloop music, and not too loud please.
**** The bottom part *****
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