Yes, Google, I do think you have made me stoopid! Well, read for yourself and you decide. My brain synapsis fire differently now. Ah, well, maybe it’s not just Google. I sometimes wonder if it has made us less of a research and think society and more of a check out Wikipedia and write. Shaun Tan @#ny12scbwi said drawing is thinking. Well, so is writing. I think writing is drawing too. Maybe we don’t put pencil to paper and make a line, crooked or straight. Maybe we don’t use ink to define the line. Maybe we don’t use color to illuminate or add depth. But in writing we do draw everything from conclusions to a hook to a horrific cliff [not fiscal, those aren’t as real as my cliffs].
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, yes. It can be. But me, I’d take the thousand words first. It’s harder for me to see the mind working in a picture, because once it is completed it is done. We can draw story out from what we see, but a picture to me is more about how the artist sees the world or wants to see it or doesn’t see it, but imagines it. That’s sort of what Shaun Tan said.He said when you know the story, it’s not good. Whoa! Very metaphysical and just plain deep. Maybe that’s why a picture book story is so very hard for me, the combination of story and picture frustrates me, it’s the lack of control, the ability of someone else making the story more. For me, when I read those thousand words, well, I can see the writer’s mind moving slowly through the story, picking and choosing words, placing them in a certain order, making the story progress at their pace. That is my kind of drawing.