No. 19: Vintage Objects Challenge

Plateaus are normal. Especially with art skills. One can look back and see tons of progress and feel encouraged, while at the same time feel stuck in a perpetual spinning hamster wheel of stagnant tools. It's the worst. I want to share a story about a challenge series I used to move my skills forward two years ago. It's my 100 Inanimate Objects which started as a drawing challenge and turned into a lovely Vintage Object poster.

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As a writing warm up one day, I made a list of vintage things that I find incredibly adorable. Normally these lists are just to get the juices flowing. But I found myself later that week flipping back to the list, adding things to it, looking up items on Pinterest, and daydreaming about this list quite a lot.

I was home at the time, visiting my parents, and Momola let me play with her antique UnderWood typewriter. So I decided to take the vintage objects idea and turn it into a personal drawing challenge. My drawing skills were frustrating me - relying on digital too much, crutching on dark outlines, languishing on immature flat shapeless coloring. The goal was to draw a little each day and hopefully fail-forward to understanding color, light and darkness. So I typed out the vintage object prompts on a stack of little sheets. I brought the stack home to my desk and drew out a couple at a time as a daily warm-up.

Black Underwood Typewriter.

Pencil shavings and the first awful color studies of vintage objects by Smarti.

Illustration of a wingback chair above typed words "Blue Chair" by Smarti.

Underwood photo, stack of illus, blue chair illustration by @thesmarti

Personal challenges are often embarrassing and exhausting. You have to be ok with being really bad AND still have the courage to keep going. So many of my first attempts were lame. I mean, likely - really lame. There was a lot of groaning and a tendency to want to just slink down out of my seat to the floor. I just wasn't improving as I thought I would. But at least it was fun to look up vintage things...

And then eventually around day 60, I started to see a shift. Coloring with pencils forced me to look at hues - and I started to see color as an elusive eye trick. Things that are blue are not actually blue but green and black and purple sometimes. So I let myself play with different colors and lean into the exploration. And then I started to see shadows. Muted colors of undertones in and under every object. So I started to try to smudge them in with my pencils. And it gave objects weight and gravity and a bit of realism in a wonky way. Play and exploration - silly and unforgiving - but still a way to get into the lessons and try to absorb some knowledge.

Illustration of a vintage periwinkle atomizer above the typewritten "perfume atomizer" by Smarti.

Assorted illustrations of vintage objects on a desk by Smarti.

Colored pencil illustration of a marbled FM radio by Smarti.

perfume atomizer ilustration by @thesmarti, stack of illus, radio ilustration by @thesmarti

I think, more interestingly, my hands and fingers started learning a language of their own in movement. Sliding, swooshing, shimmying across the page with an audible satisfaction of grit and texture conferred on the page. I liked seeing how my eye-to-hand coordination got more exact and I felt a greater sense of subtlety in the pencil pressure I put on the page. I still leaned heavily on outlines and my shadow work is immature, but I felt like I was slowly getting somewhere. I posted the progress on IG during the year of 2022 and took a lot of joy in researching the history of the objects for the captions.

At the end of the challenge, I had a stack of 101 inanimate objects sketches. I scanned each one in, cleaned them up and assembled them together in a celebratory poster Vintage Objects. I, of course, only used some of my best drawings, or at least the ones I felt were the best portrayed. (You can find that poster and more of the drawings here.) And is it amazing? Not exactly. But am I proud of myself? Yes. Did I learn a lot? Oh heck yea. I could literally track my progress and see that over time, this challenge had changed my ability to "see" things and capture some nuance.

Vintage Object poster by @thesmarti

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Trying to be an artist can feel ridiculously frustrating at times. I see other artists all around me on instagram who incredible and talented beyond my wildest dreams. The lesson I sit with often is that I have to be ok with where I'm at right now. Growth happens slowly. Purposefully. Paying attention and creating moments of learning is important to building my own talent and failing forward.

And even when I've figured out some skills, I will always be failing in some other aspect and that's ok. The goal is to find joy wherever you are. I feel like this project gave me a little taste of that. There is a beauty in the willingness to experiment and feel foolish, and the everlasting lesson to not give up. [...] It's also fun to know that a good gritty pencil can soften my mood any day.

happy art challenges, dear friends,

smarti