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Why Messy Is Good

There is no shortage these days of illustrations and designs that are clean, smooth, and flat. Vector drawings are popular because people like this look (I like them too, but a lot of that is because they're fun to make). It works well on websites and in apps. I can't deny that it looks very nice, and it's what I've come to expect in app and web design.

While that's all fine and good when it comes to digital art, when I'm making traditional artwork, I don't do that. At least, I don't do it often. I like to make things a little more messy. I want to make it look like an actual person made it. I don't want it to look like it could have been made by a machine. I like any art with a discernible human touch.

In college, in drawing class, it seemed that everyone, including the professor, was obsessed with clean edges. The edge of the drawing had to be taped so that it was straight, and there couldn't be anything in the margins. Besides the fact that I didn't want to deal with the annoyance of measuring and taping and wanted to just draw something, I like fuzzy edges. It's fine to have a clearly defined margin and a clear edge of the artwork, but it doesn't have to be entirely straight. It can be fuzzy. Yes, fingerprints in the margins are normally frowned upon, but it wouldn't kill you to have a little bit of graphite or charcoal or ink in your margin. If you think your piece is that important, you're probably going to frame it anyway, so no one will even see it. Let it be a little messy. People will know that someone, a human, made it.

This is one reason why I have an aversion to photorealistic paintings. We have cameras. They can capture an image almost exactly the way it would look in real life. Therefore, while I respect the skill that photorealistic painters have and the time they put into their pieces, I don't see the point of them. While I do like a painting to have a discernible subject, I want it to be a little messy. I want things to be a little distorted, a little abstracted. Let me know that it's something you, a human, made, and that a machine couldn't have done. Infuse it with your humanity.

The point is, we have machines that do all kinds of things for us, and eventually they'll be doing art for us, too. If you, a human, are going to create an artwork, let me know you did it. Don't think that just signing your name will tell me that. Give the work your human signature. Embrace messiness.