Challenge One – Scribble!

Let's get started by stretching out your creative muscles and limbering up. Create nothing, and turn it into something.

Materials

 * Blank paper (the back of a used piece is fine)
 * Pencil

What to do
Close your eyes. Drag the pencil around on the page. Press hard enough to make your marks visible. Try to keep the marks big and loose, and vary the strokes with loops, waves, and squiggles. Do this for about 15-30 seconds, then stop. Scan or take a picture of your starting scribble so that you can post it later. Look at your picture. What do you see? Darken in the places that look like something, and erase marks that don't.

If you don't see a picture right away, you can:
 * Turn the paper a quarter turn, and look again. Keep turning it until a picture emerges
 * Close your eyes and scribble some more
 * Impose your own vision on the scribble, turning it into something you want to see

Now post your scribble and the final picture on the Challenge One results page!

Why do it?
The reason that every human can draw is that we share a mental quirk called pareidolia. The term comes from the Greek para- which means "similar" (like a paramedic is something like a doctor) and eidolon which means an ideal or apparition. Pareidolia is seeing patterns and meaning in the world around us, such as seeing a face in the moon, a horse in the clouds, or the Madonna on a grilled-cheese sandwich. We enjoy finding these patterns, and everyone who has eyes and can move a pencil is able to create these images. We call it drawing, and everyone can do it.

There is a misconception that artistic expression requires talent. In truth, like any other skill, drawing requires ''time. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers,'' says that anyone who spends 10,000 hours praciticing a skill will become an expert. Going further, anyone who spends 1,000 hours doing something will be pretty darn good (after that, the progress is more gradual). Anyone who wants to draw will see steady progress by doing one and only one thing: drawing.

Remember to have fun. Artistic expression is not in the having, it's in the doing. If it's fun, we do more of it, and those 10,000 hours melt away in pure pleasure.