How I learnt to draw + the new Qh logo

I remember the first time I ever wanted to truly draw. I must have been about 7 or 5. I was seated on the floor in my grandfather’s living room, being babysat by my Uncle Edgar, whom I must have been mildly grating on, despite entertaining him with my nonsense. I’m not sure how the subject of drawing cars came up, but suddenly he had a black Bic pen in his hand and some paper, or was it a book? He scratched at the book furtively and somewhat furiously, and then gave me the paper to behold.

Alas! In black and white, with crosshatched values, was a close up view of the rear of an SUV in motion, likely a Pajero, from the left rear to the front; showing the left rear lights, the wheel, doors, and sidemirrors. It looked unbelievably real! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I experienced the same thrill I would have had I seen it outside. I couldn’t describe the range of emotions that I felt but they were like nothing I had felt before. From that moment on, I had a burning desire to be able to draw anything I liked as quickly as possible.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something, and while I am no master, you would think it has taken me thousands of hours to learn to draw. Not really. I can count how many drawings I’ve ever done because there aren’t that many—and that includes the sketches at the back of the notebook when the Math teacher was being boring.

I began trying to draw that fateful night, and then the next day, and the next. All my free time, at recess, lunch and home in the evenings was spent drawing. I made no progress at all. I showed everybody my drawings. Each week we had a joint session with the adjoining class for one of the subjects, and I was showing the guests my drawings when one of the boys mocked them and told me their classmate drew matatus (Kenyan party buses) and his drawings were much better. I asked who, and immediately went in search of them. I was shown said drawings, and was thoroughly impressed—nothing close to Uncle Edgar’s, but closer than mine. I wanted to learn his technique; he refused to teach it to me. I decided to imitate it to the best of my ability. I tried really hard, and only produced two or three, then I gave up and forgot all about drawing for years.

In about two weeks I went from caring nothing about drawing, to living solely to draw, to forgetting all about it (classic ADHD behavior). Ever since, when I cared about drawing, it was all I cared about and I had an all-consuming passion to draw to perfection; perhaps chasing the feeling I felt that first time I saw Uncle Edgar’s drawing. Then, I after trying my absolute best, I would be frustrated by the progress and would throw everything away in bitterness, and completely forget about drawing. This pattern repeated itself over many years. Sometimes I would go weeks, sometimes months and even years, but every time I picked up the pencil, I had a burning desire to produce life itself, and every time, I was surprised at how much better I was than the last time, before realizing I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be. It’s not always that I had improved in the interim and this realization would frustrate me. I would feel stuck and think desperately what to do next. Over school holidays in high school, I would slink off to a cyber cafe in my town and scour the web for tips and tricks. I discovered Linda Huber, a true talent and professional, who inspired me more than any other artist had and whose drawing tips improved my art considerably. She became my ideal, and learning that it took her hours to produce a single drawing made me want to spend a lot more time on each drawing. I marveled at M.S Escher’s work too and on the catalogs of random artists on DeviantArt. They were my inspiration. Yet, despite all this, in all my primary high school years, I don’t think I drew more than 30 pictures, and one year I drew only one.

After my final year in high school, I had honed my technique. I began to think about drawing portraits for pocket money. One day while at a family friends’, I asked him if I could draw his mum’s portrait from an old picture on their living room wall. He agreed and we settled on a price of $10. My first commission! I was excited. It took me a few days of intermittent drawing, and in the process I discovered how nice it felt to be paid to do something you loved. After that portrait, life got in the way, and all I could do was an odd portrait here or there over many years, the last one being in 2020.

***

Making art, for me, is like a religious experience. I still remember my first religious experience. Again, I was a small boy of 7 or 5, and was to accompany my Grandfather to church. I don’t think it was my first time going to a church, or to that particular one for that matter, but going with Babu was different—you had to be present. I felt like it was going to be my first time meeting God, and I was nervous. It was not unlike the nervousness I had recently at the time developed around my classmate Joanne. For years, she was just back-of-the-class plain old Joanne. A bit chubby and as sincere as an open palm. She loved to laugh, and I loved to make her laugh. It’s all we ever did. Then one day, I realized that all I wanted was to be in her presence, to possess things that were exclusively hers: like her handwriting, or her distinct chuckle. And still, I felt ashamed of being around her, like she would one day snap out of it and realize that I wasn’t fit to be in her company after all, and then she would laugh at someone else’s jokes. I felt the same as I walked with Babu to church—eager yet unworthy to meet God.

Babu was always either the most serious man you ever met, or the most social. I adapted to his moods. That grey chilly morning we were our most sombre. I grew increasingly nervous as we walked up the steps, through the doors, dipped our fingers in the water bowl and signed the cross. We choose seats three quarters of the length to the pulpit.

I didn’t know the proceedings of a Catholic mass correctly, which only increased my feelings of shame, so I copied the congregation as we stood, and sat, and sang and clapped, and listened and responded, and signed the cross, and greeted our neighbors and gave our tithes. All the while, I kept an eye out for God. I don’t know what I expected, but I expected something. Surely, I felt His presence, but He never spoke or did anything. I felt like He was watching me the whole time and was on my best behavior. By the time the congregation knelt for what I would later learn had something to do with the sacrament, I had a burning desire to escape His presence. I thought going outside would do best—surely God was paying more attention to the people inside the church—the worthy ones—than to those outside it. So while Babu was kneeling down with his eyes closed, I slinked away. The moment I walked through the door, my nervousness subsided a bit, but not entirely.

Drawing, for me, has always been as intense as that experience was.

***

I don’t know where I go when I draw but I am definitely on a different plane. My mind is absolutely focused on what I just did and what I will do next. I plan ahead to what I will do when I get to this portion, or that. I ache to get to the good parts, while dreading the difficult parts, and rack myself about how to deal with the impossible ones. I make plenty of mistakes along the way, sometimes in succession, but I never mind it. There is no other area of my life where I am as forgiving of my mistakes as in art. Sometimes I even erase good parts so I can make them better! I never think about time. I don’t feel hungry, or thirsty, and I can hold my pee forever. I only realize later, when my back or neck is aching, that I had been sitting poorly.

And my curiosity peaks when I draw. Say I am drawing a duck, then I want to become a duck for the time it takes to draw it. I wonder what ducks think about, what they like, what they hate, what they do at night, how long they live, how many colors of ducks there are, what’s the biggest a duck can be, what’s the smallest, how does the water feel to a duck as it swims in a lake…

When I finish drawing, I am filled with peace and tranquility. I feel as though I have touched life’s quiddity. Whatever worries I had before seem to have disappeared. Unlike when I was a child, I no longer have a desire to show people my drawings. But when people see them and marvel at them as I marveled at Uncle Edgar’s car, I marvel at their marveling. I wonder how they don’t see the glaring mistakes, or why many admit they couldn’t draw to save their lives. I can never understand how they can’t do it, or why they never want to try. C’est bizzare!

I don’t think I’ve spent over 1000 hours drawing, or drawn more than 50 things, from doodles to full pieces of art. But, the intensity with which I wanted to know how to draw was one of the most violent and virulent feelings I have ever had in my life. I couldn’t learn fast enough. The progress felt like heaven, while being stuck felt like death. Every drawing was like climbing a mountain. I am never satisfied with my skills and technique, I want to prove to myself that I can do it, over and over again. But I don’t just draw for the sake of it. It’s been four years now since I last drew anything, but when I do draw again, I will choose the biggest challenge I can imagine.

***

The idea for this blog’s logo hit me one morning as I lay in bed right after waking. I noticed that a Q looks like a knob turned to max, so the logo could just be a Q-looking knob turned to max with ‘(h)Edge’ replacing ‘max’. Then, as with every idea I have, my perfectionism took over. I suddenly wanted it to be a gif: a hand turning the knob. Then I wanted the scale to be digital and to go from red to green as the knob was turned. Then I had specific ideas about every little detail. I wrote a whole logo concept board, you can download it here.

And this is what I wrote about the concept:

QH is a substack about edge and hedge. It is for the kind of people who are always in the pursuit of it. These people are on the extreme. The idea of the Q turning to max shows the ‘Quantitativeness’ going to the max, and the hand is the reader showing that they are pushing this ‘Quantitativeness’ to the max. It also invites the reader to max their interest in QH subconsciously. The Q itself symbolizes everything the blog is about and I think it is just absolutely beautiful that the dash in the Q ends at the max. (h)Edge is something that is like a secret between the author and the reader. I have not seen it before, and the brackets around the h really really invite the reader into this unique world where it is neither Edge, nor hedge that we are after but both combined. It is like a new word written in a weird way that is also immediately known. Like the reader knew that language all along. And also plays with symbols like in mathematics, adding that curious appeal to quanty people. It is playful, and childish and has this quality as if it really is the only way that one could have written it.

Nothing about the logo though is more symbolic than the Q dial going to max. That motion alone captures so much that it is difficult to put in words. There is a visceral feeling involved. We all know the feeling of turning a dial and pushing something to the extreme. Volume, heat, whatever. In that moment, we interact with nature. We exert our will. We put things just where we like it, and if we really like it, we push it to the max. That feeling of pushing something to the max; of dialing something to the max also invites curiosity. What do you get when you push (h)Edge to the max? It evokes a feeling of satisfaction in ones mind.

The hand also adds an element of seduction: someone has decided to turn the dial to the max, right there, right in front of you as you are reading. It is like someone has turned on the telly for you. Like the content of the blog is pre-selected, curated for you: “for your reading pleasure.”, the motion says. It is inviting.

That the knob is ‘knobby’ is a nod to engineering. It invokes the feeling that this is a serious thing. There is real work going on around here. It is not a pretentious modern minimal knob, which looks like it is there for show. It looks like it means business. It reminds the reader of when gadgets were real, and labourious and ‘gadgety’, and made you feel their presence. And because of this, you became hyperaware of them, and hyperaware of how different you were from them. You felt more human and alive—Man versus Machine.

The other knobs also invite curiosity about what else is out there. It signals that someone had a choice among many, but chose (h)Edge, and when the knob is turned, it doesn’t pan back to the other knobs as if they are sort of irrelevant at the moment. Not out of competition, but because the reader’s attention is engaged with (h)Edge right now. The visualisation of the scale of (h)Edge increasing is sort of like a harbinger: after reading QH, they gain (h)Edge. But it makes the reader feel like this (h)Edge is here in the room with us, now that the dial has been turned.

So this whole experience of the knobs, the hand, the turning of the dial, and the final resting turned dial that is all the way up packs a lot of emotion that captures everything that I believe QH is about. Finally, QH sounds like HQ. It’s a hidden connection that isn’t easy to spot so there are latent feelings of going to a headquarters. There is some authoritativeness baked in, but in a playful way that is not domineering. You feel like you are in league with the bosses. Like you are actually the final boss. The 3d aspect is to make it very real so that it bypasses your defenses. It gives the feeling of everything else in nature. Like it’s always been there just like the trees, the river, the mountains. Like many before you have laid their eyes on it and many more will after you. It opens you up to adventure. It is like a breath of fresh air.

Btw, to keep the emotion alive. The final still shot can have a blinker at the max to really bring home the fact that we are at max (h)Edge. This mysterical force or energy, and also make the readers blood quicken with a sense of urgency. Same thing they get in the market.

***

Sounds cool right? Well, this is what I actually made, in MS paint. Go back and read my initial concept right after I had woken up, it’s exactly this:

No fancy-shmancy gif, just the original concept in as simple a manner as possible, yet I like it more than the GIF idea. I don’t know what this all means, I’ll leave that for the philosophers among us. For me, it is a lesson about how perfect is the enemy of good, and I’m sharing it so you can see your own reflection in my shenanigans.

Until next time,

Brian