Walking the not-so-straight line

After posting my article yesterday about our tendency to look for perfection I remembered an old friend of the family and also art teacher of mine who always abhorred the digital technologies. He deemed them too perfect, too precise, to the point that they lack texture, a personality, a soul. It is the comparison between artisanal and industrial products: the latter might be almost perfect, with circles which are equidistant from the center, coatings which are perfectly uniform in color, surfaces which are absolutely spotless, but in the end it is inescapable the feeling that it is an serial product, manufactured en masse in some southeast Asian country for a ridiculously low price. This approach not only applies to gizmos, but also to some personal services (think call centers) and even more and more food products. In the end, every time we walk into a fast-food venue (it does not matter if it is for meals, drinks or dessert) we are intrinsically asking for the exactly the same experience that we have had already so many times before, perhaps somewhere across the continent.

Artisanal products, on the other hand, are intrinsically one bet after another against entropy and human nature. When you hand-pick the meat you are going to cook instead of sourcing it from an industrial slaughterhouse you are placing a bet on your ability to handle the (greater) variability that this meat is going to entail. When you set a lump of clay on the potter's wheel you are taking the risk of attempting to extract the vase you want from that particular lump and not any other. And then all that is compounded with the human limits to self control and repeatability.

Photo: pixy.org

A few weeks ago I saw a documentary on an master wood carver and he pointed out that, as any human, he made mistakes all the time. What makes a master is the ability to react to their own failures without having to go back to square one. Luckily, it is not all disadvantages: because artisans are not bound by a program or a production lane, they have the privilege of being able to change the plan half-way through the process, compensating for the unexpected or even ending up with a completely different result if that is what best suits the situation. How many times did you start to cook a fried egg and ended up with scrambled ones?

Digital artists (and the companies producing the digital tools) are becoming more and more aware of the need to provide some amount of irregularity in the scenes to make it look more natural. Almost 20 years ago now, the American animation move Monsters, Inc. was one of the first one to animate each individual hair (5 million of them) of the main character separately. The task was huge, but the result demonstrated that it was worth the effort. These days hordes of attacking monsters and armies of battling soldiers are more and more frequently generated by digital means, but now they do not move in unison, and they do not even follow the same pattern of actions, so that the chaos that ensues during the battle looks somewhat "natural".

Among illustrators the tendency is the same: there are certain techniques that require very flat coloring, and in those cases nothing can top the digital tools, but there are times where even the vibration of your hand has an effect on the thickness of the line and preserving this variation is important to give the drawing character. Karen is well aware of this trade-off and that is why she loves the graphic tablet that she bought some months ago: the feeling is almost like drawing on paper, but with infinite repeats and with many, many more tools than she could ever buy in a shop. Plus there is no risk that she would accidentally topple the water of the watercolors and ruin a whole morning worth of work.

In summary, industrial products and straight lines are necessary (and good) for certain situations but they are not enough to cover all cases, where a handicraft or a hand-drawn line are much richer and personal. Please keep an eye out and try to spot the adequate choice each time, because it can make a big difference for yourself and the people near you. Have a nice evening.