Last week I took advantage of my student AOI membership and decided to attend a workshop called “How to Make Mistakes on Purpose”. This 90-minute session included a Q&A section at the end, so I was conscious that it was not going to be in-depth. The facilitator, Laurie Rosenwald, has run these sessions in different forms for a number of years but is just bringing out a book with the same title as the workshop. Unfortunately, this meant that sometimes the workshop felt like purely a promotional activity - a taster if you will - for her book.
Now, one thing I need to state upfront, we were specifically asked “not to describe it, and to swear "omertà", the Mafia code of silence”. Unfortunately, this puts me in a bind as I need to document this learning experience as part of my studies. While the printed book is not available, the Kindle version was. So I purchased the book [1] before the workshop. Having now experienced both, there are (perhaps not surprisingly) clear links and similarities between the two. Enough similarities that if like me, you were to buy the book before taking her workshop, you would not be surprised by the workshop’s content.
Laurie is very engaging and enthusiastic. Perhaps sometimes too ‘engaging’ for me: she never seemed to stop talking or dropping anecdotes even during the main activity of the session. I found this actually really exhausting and distracting but it did keep the engagement and energy level high for the session. I am not going to cover the pre-amble or Q&A parts of the workshop to keep that content ‘secret’ but I will cover off the primary activity, which directly relates to my learning journey.
Laurie mentioned her fear of the blank page, which I can relate to. Her initial act of deliberate practice was to force herself to work fast and loose, so as to disconnect with the results and engage with the action. This allowed her to reflect on what was created after to see where happy accidents have emerged, or to interpret the work in different ways. That allowed for work to then have a life on its own, kind of like a ‘primordial soup’ for ideas and creativity.
To get our own little taste of 'soup making', Laurie asked us to grab a sheet of paper I initially was going to go A2, but Laurie invited all the attendees to upload their work anonymously to the HTMMOP Flickr group. So I chose an A3 pad so I could scan in my work. Laurie put on some music, and then basically gave us prompt after prompt after prompt of things to draw - going and going until there was no more space and it was onto the next sheet. It was pretty relentless, but in that space, you stop thinking too much and just get stuff out of your head and onto the page.
It's not like I couldn't do that myself - I am not sure it's easy to do as a self-directed activity at the best of times, let alone when an act of deliberate practice like that needs a certain amount of executive functioning to activate. So in that regard, I think the session was a very useful one. I might find it hard to repeat that exact exercise, but it did remove the fear of them and gave me the confidence to start to think about how I can create similar conditions my own way. Here are my prompted doodles:
It was great value of money through the Association of Illustrators, and I'd recommend other OCA students participate if they are able to do so in the future. You can find Laurie's book for sale here but if you can, shop with your local bookstore!
References
Rosenwald, L. 2021. How to Make Mistakes on Purpose - bring chaos to your order. [Kindle]. New York: Hachette Go
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