always in training

[annulareye]

i'm going to be parsing a lot of layperson's brain-wiring stuff here as i learn and re-learn through a body constantly in flux, that can do so much less than it could but still has the ability to adapt, reach, and grow. understanding connections is the most vital thing at this moment. micro and macro, as above, so below.

when the dancer mary ellen donald began to lose her sight, she learned to drum, and lived and shared the rhythms that way instead. she was a teacher i haven't forgotten. embodiment, flux, continuation, transmission.

i've never done real digital art until this year; am relearning my hand/eye connections right now with pencils, brushes, and hardest of all this slippery little tablet. the longer i live, the more i realize how neurodivergent i am. i rely on haptic feedback so much to guide myself through my whole day. i don't always use my eyes to see. frequently it's more like a kind of sonar. i didn't realize until lately, tho, how much i use the friction and tension between tool and paper to move the feelings in my hands, which then pull the content through.

i don't really look or visualize when i draw--i feel. and i've lost a lot of motor control over the past few years, and that feeling of flow through my hands is almost all i have left. the point of pressure is the nexus, the crossroads. it's where i have to momentarily live for it to happen.

so this cheap, lightweight, nonergonomic, awkwardly-buttoned pen skating over its twitch-and-you'll-drop-it matte surface is like drawing on an ice cube with a nail. i'm wrestling hard enough with the unfamiliar operations of synthetic layering and weighting and coloring of an image--it's organization, not intuition, it's what my brain is worst at--and the inability to really connect with the line has driven me to tears several long nights already. i know i'll get used to it in time but i'm desperate for the connections to build.

i want to paint all the time right now; the joy of fanart and the personal exploration of what it shades into are so vital and delicious, have truly been sustaining me, so when the equipment (including the non-intuitive, handbookless program and my laptop itself) malfunctions at every stage it's almost more than i can take some nights, along with the headache, tinnitus and brain fog that also make me transpose letters and words and sometimes struggle to express in any way at all.

despite the fact that there's a lot of rage attached to the continuous losses of progressive disability and this all sounds incredibly depressing, these terms are what i'm used to and each breakthrough with even one small thing makes it worth it. the little things are nourishing; they are sacred food and signposts each pointing the way to the next one. so fingers crossed as all the little neurons, the pretty brain-gardens grow, so mote it be, i make it so.

(i'm seeing as i write this out just how furious i am. it's ok and good to be able to verbalize; the more facility i re-acquire, the more places there will be for me to put and USE it. a tool like nay other, and necessary to aerate the hard-packed and brutalized earth.)

(this must mean it's finally safe to let a little of it out, too. a blessing.)

(...is this fandom related? given my personal points of attachment i think i can safely say that yes, it actually is. still, tagging this for what ppl can either engage with or avoid like the plague.)

Comments

[merelydovely]

I'm glad you are able to let it out!

What tablet are you using? I know some people do just stick a piece of actual paper over their tablet to give them slightly more haptic feedback than the actual surface does.

[annulareye]

i’m using the one by wacom w a chromebook, and i had NO IDEA that anything other than a special overlay would work for that! a piece of paper! thank you! i have some of those! (and in frustration have been using them to actually draw on…)

how many ppl do you think do their linework on paper then transfer to digital for everything else?? i’ve spent 2 hrs trying to get something right w the tablet that i can do on paper in 5 mins. i hope it’s just a learning curve on a tiny tablet thing and not a this-won’t-ever-work-for-me thing.

seriously, thank you for the tip, though; it might be the gamechanger

[merelydovely]

There's definitely a tough learning curve to moving your hand on the tablet while looking at the screen instead of what's happening under your stylus, and some people find it more frustrating than others. Given the cognitive difficulties you described and the fact that you're not a kid with a brain made of plastic, I can easily imagine it feeling like trying to draw with oven mitts on.

I've been using a tablet off and on since I was around 13 or 14 (I'm 30), and it feels relatively straightforward to draw the thing I'm trying to draw, but it's still not the same. I get more precision for some things and less for others. 15+ years on and it's still VERY common for me to import a pencil sketch to get started. However, it no longer feels necessary to scan quality traditional linework in to get quality digital linework out, the way it was when I was first getting started. Now I just take a shitty phone photo of my shitty thumbnail sketch, and I can get from there to quality linework in whatever digital program I'm using. In my recent twitter art post, for example, the only piece that was traditional media first was the comic page, because I needed to thumbnail-plan the panels, and in real life it's only about the size of my hand. But when I was younger and still getting the hang of the tablet, I would've needed a MUCH cleaner sketch, practically already complete, in order to get to that level of finish in digital.

Another thing that might be making the process more difficult for you is how small the Chromebook's screen is. I've owned a Chromebook and I would NOT want to use it with a drawing tablet. Like, I could manage, it's not like I can't sketch in a tiny corner of a Moleskine, but something about small screens always makes me a little mentally claustrophobic and I don't feel as natural sketching with them.

Something that might help improving your hand-eye coordination with the drawing tablet would be Darren Calvert's Mechanical Drawing Exercises. You could go back and forth between trying some of them on paper and trying them in your digital art program to see where the gaps in precision are cropping up the most.

[annulareye]

this was such a great gift! i cannot thank you enough. it took a bit of time to absorb, but i think it's still percolating in the network and handing out revelations with regularity. i cannot tell you how much better it makes me feel that i'm not alone in having so much comfort in a layer of pencil. i feel like such a dinosaur, learning in the center of my life what all bbs pick up with their bottles nowadays. but dinosaurs must keep trying with their mitts on, if they're ever to get a message through...

since writing this original post (and getting flared up and falling back, as i'm forced to do, bleh) i've gotten the tablet out when i can and am slowly, one by one, acquiring microskills. and feeling very slow! but slow is ok, it wins the race, or so we were told, once upon a time. i'm getting enough joy to move forward at last!

i beg yr pardon for this slowness and offer a great astral bouquet to you--you're a jewel here, there, and everywhere, and we're every one of us lucky to share space with you. <3

[merelydovely]

returning to dreamwidth due to the Elon Musk trashfire on twitter, after forgetting it existed for well over a year, this was such a nice message to come back to TT_TT i'm so glad you've been able to explore the tablet in microdoses!! i hope a year later you've still been gaining confidence with it :)