Try mark-making to increase your attention to defaults
*Defaults influence us more than we realize. By changing our tools, and trying new ones, we can become more aware and play against those defaults - and thereby improve skills we use daily. *
Mark making
We all use our preferred set of tools. But how much do the tools influence the way we work? Artists have had a changing relationship with the visibility of the tools. Regardless of the medium, we either work with the tool, making the relationship between it and the resulting mark obvious - or work against it, trying to conceal the process by which a mark or an effect was achieved.
Here, an impressionist features the brush strokes while a Dutch painter labors till all traces of a brush’s presence have been smoothed out.
In either case, great art transcends the tools that were used to create it and speaks its message louder than the presence of the medium. But let’s focus on the marks.
Custom tools
One artist I found inspirational for exploratory work with marks is Dorothy Caldwell. She works with organic materials, mark making, and fiber arts. Here is a neat collection of examples. She also teaches the Human Marks workshops. Among other exercises, participants create ink drawings with various tools, most of them modified or custom. I feel that it is the attentive, deliberate use of custom tools that helps achieve the best results.
A personal exercise, painted with a watercolor brush I modified to behave like a stencil brush, with a flat tip to draw an even line when held vertically.
Faced with a stick or a sponge in place of a brush for ink, we have no choice but to slow down, examine it carefully and let the instrument teach us.
changing tools changes the mark and behavior. Try some new ones!
Just short of fully custom tools, consider changing or re-examining the tools you use every day. For a quick exercise, I took a selection of pens and markers through a very basic preparatory exercise to test them - similar to how one would test a calligraphy pen.
Interestingly, the pen that I expected to yield the least interesting results and the most “boring”, even line for this exercise - the Sharpie I use almost every day at the office - gave me a nicer random line than the other pens. The almond shaped tip allowed for just enough variation in line thickness to make a pleasing, but not too sharply contrasted, squiggle. Here it is.
This quick exercise confirmed what I had already expected out of my pens - varied width tips create their own unique line “signatures”. I also refreshed my visual memory of what to expect out of different tools I already have.
Attention to defaults
Trying new tools will certainly help discover new possibilities. (Here’s your excuse to buy a cool new marker, if you needed one!) But our existing, everyday tools deserve even more attention. Do we use specific ones just out of habit, or are they the best for the job?
And I feel that digital tools need care and attention just like the paper, pens and pencils. When I first tried Sketch in place of Photoshop and Illustrator, the most impactful transformation seemed to be not just the availability of vector drawing tools tailored for UX design, but the bright, airy feeling of the entire interface.
I attribute my initial impression to the careful selection of background color, dartboard set-up and the default colors and strokes on the shapes you can make in Sketch. Compared to my previous experience, this new Sketch tool felt lighter and somehow happier.
Even though I can easily adjust the environment and palettes in most applications I work in - I rarely do. Defaults, color and texture palettes, and presets have a huge influence on our work. Even though we change these defaults 99% of the time, the changes we make are in context, and against the pre-existing conditions.
So, next time you get the chance - play with new tools! Then play with your defaults. And choose the tools and settings you work with - on purpose.