Back to basics: the latest daily drawing journey
We are in the thick of autumn in the northern hemisphere, which means my brain is programmed to think I’m in an academic setting. Here’s where that’s taken me lately…
Daily drawings (again)
It’s October, which means if you spend any amount of time on art-oriented social media, lots of people are doing daily drawing challenges, often ones that incorporate ink drawings. I’ve partaken in these activities on and off over the years; they’re a great way to practice going from concept to finished drawing quickly. (Most of the images on the sketches page on my website are old drawings from these kinds of challenges!) My first public newsletter post on Buttondown was a daily drawing challenge post, too; sadly, shortly after writing it, I totally abandoned that project 😂 😅 Lynda Barry’s daily drawing prompts are modeled after her actual coursework after all, and so they are on the intense side.
(There is a secret other daily drawing project I worked on earlier this year but have yet to share…mostly because I’m ashamed of myself for abandoning it. It was seriously helping me with a skill I haven’t really worked on, but I fell off the wagon for several reasons. 👀 I will actually share some of that before the end of the year, I swear!)
Part of the reason I love these challenges is, well, I’m a nerd. Give me homework, daddy. It’s an itch I’ll perpetually need to scratch. Moreover, as I find myself deeper in my 30s, I find myself with more responsibilities and chores and boring things, so even setting aside fifteen minutes a day over the course of a month feels revitalizing. If you have a little bit of discipline, you can wind up teaching yourself something wonderful along the way.
Over many daily drawing challenges I’ve discovered a few things about myself as an artist:
I embrace the absurd
I enjoy juxtaposing a few incongruous things together, and pretty often it turns out emanating the vibe I want it to
I absolutely will overwork the shading every single time
I still avoid drawing human hands in exactly the same ways I did when I was 14
I always feel better after drawing, even if it’s just for five minutes
Enough preamble. Let’s see some damn drawings!
My rules for drawing this year are:
Use a timer and spend 12 min per drawing, from reading the prompt to finalizing the drawing.
Primarily use monochrome ink, but limited other color is allowed
Utilize prompts from Botober 2025
What the hell is Botober? It was started by Janelle Shane, a laser scientist who tinkers with old school machine learning algorithms. The link above is to her blog, which basically involves her putting various algorithms into funny situations to show how bad they are at various tasks. The prompts are generated using something called a character-level recurrent neural network, which is an ancient ancestor of the current GPT overlords; she trains these algorithms on something silly, like jello recipes, and then sees if the model is able to write recipes or anything else. They are famously very fussy to get working properly (I attempted to make one to generate Adventure Time-inspired dialogue back in 2019). They often create gibberish.
Why did I use Botober prompts this year? It’s fun to force yourself to interpret something that’s literally absurd. Mostly, tbh, because I am nostalgic for the time when neural networks were more like science fair projects that only a few nerds knew about. I hate how these things have morphed into things that now non-consensually eat up all the data on the Internet, are mucking up search engines and social media, and are driving the latest wave of insatiable greed and destruction (more on that below). Truly scary stuff as we approach Halloween; I wish more people in power would recognize that. As Dr. J Rosenbaum said on Bluesky, “Bring back the tiny neural nets!! I love them so. Back to the adorably janky days of fun AI I say. We had something there and now we just have fascism.”
…you could say we really crocked things up there.
I’ll see myself out.
Latest inspo
A week or so ago I finished reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, which is a dense look into the rise of OpenAI, coupled with character studies of prominent people associated with the org, how the expansion to acquire more computation power and genAI-levels of training data harms marginalized communities around the world, and how the road to genAI has privatized and closed off a lot of science. It’s not a light read, but it’s an important one.
I practically could’ve written this one; behold, a biography of how I feel everyday at work: On Being a GenAI Killjoy
The “Golden” live performance by EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami on Jimmy Fallon was beautiful and refreshing.