Drawfee and Creativity II: This Time It's Personal

Recently I wrote a post about the YouTube show Drawfee and why I like it so much. I read back over it a few days later and it seems really neutral. I was trying to rein in my tendency to rant, avoid gushing on about how much I love the show, and stick to the facts. But the reason I love Drawfee so much isn’t factual. It’s very personal. It’s sappy and gushy and completely self-centered. And this is my blog, and no one reads it, so I’m going to write the Drawfee blog I should have written the first time, and be as sappy and gushy and completely self-centered as I please.

Since I discovered that I don’t like my first Drawfee blog post only a few days after posting it, I thought about taking it down and replacing it. But blogs don’t need to be publisher-perfect. Some of my favorite blogs change radically over time. It’s interesting to see the process of someone’s thinking evolving, even when their thoughts are as dumb as mine, and about topics as dumb as anime and whatever other dumb media I’m into this month. And what could be more true to the Drawfee spirit? Like I said last time, I love Drawfee because it shows the creative process in all its strange detail. They once did an episode where they drew months as people. Then some commenter typoed the prompt and wrote “moths as people”, so they did an episode where they drew moths as people. And then yet another commenter (probably intentionally) typoed the prompt again, and next episode they were drawing mouths as people. That’s how creativity works sometimes; weird mistakes roll into deliberate choices, and random blather leads to great ideas.

When I was a teenager, I drew a lot. I wanted to be a comics artist or an animator—something that combined art and writing. And for seven years, I was deluded enough that I didn’t see that I was terrible at drawing. Then one day, a bolt of revelation struck me, and my eyes were opened, and I saw that I was bad at art, and I was bad at writing, and lots of people who were good at art and good at writing were struggling to make a living at them. So I changed college majors from English to computer science and learned to program.

Programming is not a creative activity. Maybe it was once, but nowadays, it’s less thinking of something cool to make a computer do and more making a computer do a slight variation on what everyone else’s computers are doing, which is probably taxes or inventory or some other boring bullshit. There are already tools that do everything you need and the only challenge is manhandling them together in the way you want. This takes some thought, but it’s not creative thought. It’s more like building a raft out of old bottles and driftwood than it is drawing or writing. You already know what a boat is and what it needs to do, so there’s no creative thought there. The challenge is finding enough plastic bottles and driftwood to stick together into a working boat. And even more than that, the social scene around programming is one that does not encourage creativity. Occasionally someone still shows up on a programming forum saying that code is their art and they craft beauties to shine like diamonds and pierce like swords. When this person shows up, you can count on someone else showing up to say they hate working with programmers like this and they prefer plodding workaday code. And they are not wrong, as you know if you’ve ever worked as a programmer on code that someone else wrote, particularly if they are no longer around to explain it to you. But I didn’t know any of this when I went into the computer science major, and nowadays I’m in too deep, and all I can do is shrug and go, “It’s a living” like Wilma Flintstone’s woolly mammoth vacuum cleaner.

I was just starting to realize all this when I first discovered Drawfee. At first it was just a good laugh. I laughed so much my stomach hurt at Jamm and Vibe from the obscure comics character episodes. But after a while I felt something strange: the desire to draw and write again.

The Drawfees aren’t afraid to just scrawl something stupid and bad. I stopped drawing because I was bad at it. Even though the Drawfees are all good at drawing, they don’t always draw good. When I used to draw, I treated each drawing as a huge opus, an event, something that needed the perfect idea, the perfect execution. I would sit around staring at a blank piece of paper, wondering what I should draw. The Drawfees will do a dumb bad drawing to help themselves work through drawer’s block, or to practice for a better drawing they want to do later, or to get an idea out of their systems, or just because it’s fun. That was really inspiring. It’s like the drawing version of the weird little passages I write people in text messages and Slack. On their own a lot of those are dumb and bad, but sometimes people enjoy them, and the thought process of writing them helps me stay in a writing mindset.

I started drawing again a little, just whatever dumb things popped into my head. I was still bad at it, but it didn’t seem to matter as much. I knew I would never be good. I knew I would never be an artist. There was no reason to draw at all except for the fun of it. And I started writing again. I actually planned out a book deliberately and made writing into a daily habit. I wrote 150,000 words over the course of a year and a half. And miracle of miracles, I was better at it. Maybe even okay. I knew I would never be a writer. There are economic realities here. If you want to be a writer nowadays, you’ve got to spend years puking up your guts and eating them only to puke them up again. And unless you’re exceedingly lucky, no one will look at you even to say, “Gross! Go die, loser!” Or you can write your plodding workaday code and argue with people over whether to format it with tabs or spaces and shrug and go, “It’s a living”.

The Drawfees are all lovely people, and over time I came to appreciate each of them. Nathan is such a soothing and warm presence. He’s like a sweet little boy who loves Pokemon and elephants and complimenting others. Jacob is so damned funny. His sense of humor is so close to mine, but his jokes are so much better, that in my dreams I would be like him. Julia is tough, cool, and so incredibly talented, so single-minded in her devotion to art, that she's also a total space cadet, providing the perfect contrast for Jacob’s humor to bounce off of. She’s also self-deprecating and self-doubting despite her incredible talent, and she has great taste in anime: among her favorites are Violet Evergarden and A Silent Voice. Karina is lively and fun and creative, with a sly and mischievous sense of humor, and I love her art style and sense of design probably most of any of the Drawfees. But what makes the show even more special is how they mix. You can get Nathan and Julia together and have dual space cadets, unless the subject is Pokemon, in which case Nathan becomes the most endearing version possible of that annoying kid from school who had memorized all the Pokedex entries and could sing the entire Pokerap from memory. Karina razzes Jacob like a younger sister razzing her older brother. Jacob expresses pain at Julia’s puns but then turns around and heaps praise on her art. So many memorable moments, and so many memorable drawings, have come out of the show because of the way these four people’s personalities meld together, because of the way the show combines their four unique senses of humor and aesthetics and art styles and patterns of thought. Jacob’s drawing of Vibe from the obscure Justice League members episode is still one of my favorite Drawfee segments ever, but it became so hilarious because Nathan came up with the perfect voice for the character Jacob was drawing, and everyone contributed terrible lines for him to say. None of them could have created that moment alone.

The show captures a range of moods, too. Most episodes stick to funny and pop culture-focused, because that’s what gets views, and those episodes are great. But not all of them are like that. Some episodes are calm and reflective, like the “shades of” episodes where the Drawfees do digital paintings using just different shades of a single color. Some are experimental, like the one where Nathan, Jacob, and Julia each choose a random Photoshop brush and draw an entire picture using that brush. Nathan draws something that looks like the cover of a world music album. Jacob’s drawing is minimalist and menacing. And Julia draws hockey mascot and meme star Gritty as Superman. There are episodes that play on the Drawfees’ different styles, like the one where Julia draws something nightmarish and Jacob turns it into something cute, and then Jacob draws something cute and Julia redesigns it as a horrific monster. There are episodes that focus more on technique and process, like the one where Nathan, Jacob, and Julia draw Game of Thrones characters in different styles, or the similar episode where Jacob, Karina, and Julia draw My Hero Academia characters in different styles. And there are pure comedy episodes with barely any drawing at all, like Drawfee Variety Hour. Other YouTube shows I watch have one or two moods; Drawfee has like, all the moods, just so many moods.

I think I had so much trouble saying everything I wanted to say in my first Drawfee post because my response to the show is so emotional and personal. I got closer this time, I think. I had to go back and sort out feelings I was just barely aware I had, going back years. I doubt I’ve said everything I could have this time either. And I doubt that I said anything in a way that speaks to anyone else; probably what I’ve just written is objectively a bunch of gushing and whining. But whatever, this is my dumb bad scrawl. I had to get it out of me. Here it is!