I don’t draw on my tablet anymore.
I love to draw.
Of course, it goes without saying for me, but art has been a major part of my life. Starting from childhood I’d always been the ‘art kid’, the one who always got caught doodling in the margins of their assignments, putting drawings on the back of tests, having stick figure wars with my best friend, if there was a surface I could see, it would need to be drawn on. Always drawing, always sketching, it has and always will be a major passion of mine.
Now, growing up in an era of technological jumps and surges, it was often that I’d find myself exposed to various media or tools that I could use to improve every aspect of my craft. From exposure to different mediums to instructional pages, technology had been a major push in my artistic pursuits, and nothing captivated me more than digital art. Now, I’d always loved the idea of drawing or posting art to other forums just to seek peaks of my peers, which lead to my obsession with the creating of digital art. Early on of course it was a challenge to transfer from paper to computer, most art programs of the times were limited to that of paint tools or photo shopping something that I felt was worthy of posting. Nowadays it’s much easier to get a program, a stylus or even a steady finger and create on a digital canvas. Which is what lead me to purchasing my first tablet.
The brand name or specs didn’t matter, all that mattered was that I could now in a flash, translate brush strokes to a computer image. And needless to say I was beyond hooked; drawing, posting and sharing became a sort of routine that I would spend endless hours doing the most I could to gain my skill to impress…anyone. So I’d draw, and draw, and draw, trying to get better than the last piece, replicating styles and creating characters and worlds just to impress online strangers. Laughable now, but this was what became absolutely important to me. Not to say I wasn’t impervious to being humbled, but I didn’t care, as long as I was receiving praise, it was enough.
Fast forward a few months and I was dipping back and forth between forums, posting anywhere I could, chasing any trend I could, all the while I hit the point any artist dreads… I wasn’t improving.
Normally the best advice any artist could give is to step back, re-access, study, draw anatomy, any sort of basic skill strengthening or self care that could benefit you to recharge your artistic battery. Though here is where I fell into the worst kind of pitfall, I was angry. Why didn’t any of the work I’d put in move the needle any? Why does this still look shit? What am I doing wrong? Which of course would lead to long nights of sketching, erasing, getting angry and restarting. I would seethe with frustration almost scratching the ever loving life of my tablet, surely making permanent makes into the plastic canvas.
This is when it happened.
It was about 2 in the morning, I’d finished a small sketch of a character a friend of mine had created. I’d spent the last hour going back and forth on this sketch, getting angry, restarting, and so on and so forth. One thing that is always a truth of art is that it is and will always be an extension of yourself. Think of it as a mirror of perspective, it’s your own personal look on the world that you are short handing onto a canvas. The same can be said with emotions. A piece can express the sadness of an artist in a rough patch, the focus of someone absolutely honed in to a particular image, the pure randomness of thought of someone trying to show a picture of a dream. So too is it true when you can tell the absolute anger an artist has on presenting or explaining a subject, though it can often go unnoticed while in the creative stream.
So there I was, trying to get this damn face correct over and over again. Lines on canvas jutting back and forth trying to make a semblance of sense, trying to make something…anything work. It’s during these times you don’t realize how often you can spend on a particular part of the canvas, and here I was on the face.
Faces are funny to draw, because not only is it an important part of drawing a subject, it’s important when drawing a character. They’re also funny because every so often…you could swear it was looking back at you. This thought is usually quickly squashed, if ever at all present at the time since, it’s just a drawing. This time however, it felt different.
Maybe it was a mix of the exhaustion due to my work, or maybe I was just staring at the screen for too long, but that thought never went away…
I kept going, trying to quell this trail all the while trying to stop myself from getting angrier. Though… I couldn’t shake it. Staring into these big black uncolored, unfinished eyes that I had been working on, almost loosing myself.
And that’s when those eyes blinked.
At first I had nearly gone pale just by the sight, but quickly gathered myself to throw away the thought and continue as I have been. However… I just couldn’t shake it….’The hell was that?’ I said to myself, thinking it had to have been a remnant of a memory of a scary movie I’d seen recently or some horror story I’d read online. Surely I didn’t see that, it was just a trick of the light or the program I was working with, or hell even could’ve been my tablet acting up…but…
I shook it off and continued as I was, eventually drifting back into the pitfall of anger yet again.
‘Why the hell isn’t this right?’
‘What the fuck am I doing wrong?’
‘Why does this look like shit?’
‘I hate this drawing.’
I gripped my stylus pen in anger, clutching it to my chest as I buried my other hand in my face as I sat in a curled ball of anxiety and fury almost shaking with dissatisfaction and disappointment, loudly whispering to myself.
‘Why the fuck do you look that way?!’
I sat there in a moment, just clenched with every muscle tightly contracted in pure hatred, hatred of myself, hatred of this feeling, hatred of this piece. Without thinking, I’d adjusted myself in my seat…and snuck a peak back a the canvas.
The face had changed.
The feeling of fear dipped to the bottom of my stomach, the full cold hitting the bottom of my fingertips and toes as I stared… I was almost stuck. This face, this canvas, this image looked at me…with rage.
Words cannot describe the pure fear that had gripped me as I was looking back into piercing eyes, this scorn that looked deep into my soul, this pure unfettered disgust and anger. Each wrinkle of rage etched in unflattering detail, each line almost shaking with pure malice this face had just spat at me with dread akin to seeing the spiteful rage of a mad dog baring its teeth. In many ways this face was almost threatening, much a sneering growl with its focus purely at my eyes.
This was a face of unfettered rage. And it was directed at me.
I looked back, blinking in disbelief. Hoping, begging this to be some mere flash of imagination or daydream that my tired eyes were just conjuring up, ready to be swept away in the next microsecond…and yet it remained…
‘I didnt draw this…’
‘I didn’t make this…’
‘What the fuck is this’
Suddenly my ears were hit with a shrill shrieking sound that emanated from my rudimentary computer speakers. I was taken a back as my heart nearly leapt out of my chest as I’d had no sort of sound in my hours of working, quickly rushing to my keyboard in a vain attempt to stop this sound. This shrieking, screaming sound that would not stop. I’d suddenly gained enough nerve to reach for the power cord to stop my computer, only to catch a faint glimpse of this horrendous face now fully encapsulating my screen briefly getting closer and closer. I nearly ripped the cable apart trying to take it out of the power socket. When finally, the power off the internal fan shutting off with a slight whistle and suddenly…silence.
I sat there in shock, breathing heavily in my solitude. The horrible sound now replaced with the sound of my heartbeats and panting, still unsure of what I had just witnessed. Quickly darting my eyes around the room with a horrid vision of seeing that face somehow outside of the computer screen, floating in the ether, continuing its horror…but there was nothing.
Make no mistake I’d had an issue sleeping that night, seeing flashes of the face again and again in my nightmares. It wasn’t until a week later that I’d finally gained a full nights rest, all the while completely avoiding my computer and tablet. Keeping my instance a secret to anyone who would ask what was wrong. I didn’t want to go into detail about some strange digital demon that had manifested itself on my computer screen, nor did I want to entertain the thought that it may still be there. It wasn’t until a month later that I’d even looked at that tablet, only finally seeing it again as I’d sold it to a local pawn shop. They couldn’t even pay me anything to take it, though I’d insisted I wanted it out of my hands.
To this day I can still make out the details of that horrid face, this beaming electrical apparition burned into my memory coming to haunt me for one night. Even now drawing mostly on traditional mediums I try to avoid subjects what have or resemble faces in the mere fear that this ‘thing’ may come back. Over enough time, the fear has finally gone away, only to be replaced with the pure bewilderment of just what happened.
Had my anger manifested into something? Or was it truly some digitized horror that had come to visit? Either way I’d preferred it to know, nor find out its origins.
Regardless, it’s safe to say that I don’t draw on a tablet anymore….