Protect Badness

While I was scanning my face for this Monday's "scanner adventures" post, I started drawing on top of screenshots with Snipping Tool. I'm not sure what gave me the idea, but it ended up being really fun, and I'm thinking of keeping some kind of digital sketchbook of stuff like this.

Protect badness is a kind of philosophy for encouraging and enabling art or creation of any kind that is not about technical skill. Those words came up because I just wanted to write some words, any words, on my screenshots, but I think they capture the spirit of this stuff pretty well. I think it's important to protect and respect your own personal "badness". First of all I don't think it's really "bad" because that's a value judgement, but I suppose I'm using the word "badness" to directly oppose the rejection of art regardless of the value judgement of it. Ultimately whether it is bad or not is irrelevant, because it's mine, it's for my enjoyment (of both the process and the outcome). So, embracing and protecting it in all its possible badness is my goal.

I feel like digital drawing is a great medium for this philosophy because I'm using my laptop's trackpad to draw with, which means I'm forced to draw in a technically poorer way than I am potentially able to. It's always a bit odd (especially when trying to write this way), but there's a certain ease and joy that I find comes with that limitation. It makes me feel happy to be not as technically good as I could have been, and also to just scribble on top of things. People are very busy trying to make their art look good, but a lot of the time I'm much more focused on how it actually feels to make it.