It’s been 13 months since I graduated from university. And for the same time period, I have been living in a house with 4 other people.
Thanks to the proximity of my house to the university campus, I often take the opportunity to stroll through this microcosm of society.
I suppose because I am free from the shackles of studying meaningless lecture notes, I have regained part of my sanity and clarity. And when I walk around for the sake of walking around, everything unravels in front of me in an unprecedented fashion. I could sort of zoom out and have this grand, panoramic vision of modern life.
In particular, an increasingly large part of our vision is occupied by multiple screens. What I am saying is that in ancestral times, all we saw was Nature. A kaleidoscope of flora and fauna, mountains and valleys, forests and oceans.
Perhaps 10 years ago, it would be a series of one screen. We’d switch from looking at our phones to working on our laptops to watching TV on our couch.
Yet the youngsters of today, the so-called future pillars of society are at the seemingly innocent yet smouldering mercy of multiple screens at any given time.
We have lost the ability to focus on just one screen. Not only is our laptop loaded with a bajillion tabs, we simultaneously scroll on this tiny gadget. Think of Instagram reels and TikTok shorts flooded with Al-generated fruit character slops and Kirkified images of anyone and everyone.
These memes reproduce faster than humans, at an unfathomably fast rate. They used to yearn for flying cars and conquering the galaxy, but all we have now is memetic warfare.
I have come across venture-backed startups that design apps to curb our phone addiction.
It’s most definitely a billion-dollar industry.
But I find that going back to the fundamentals is the true panacea to our short-circuited attention span.
I bought a £3 colouring book along with a set of 12 colour pencils at a shop in Kenilworth.
It wasn’t a planned decision. I only bought it because I thought the cover with the deer looked cool.
So I started to colour, for the first time in however many years.
It came as a pleasant surprise to know that I haven’t lost my artistic talent at all. Back in primary school, I was selected to be part of the advanced art class every Friday after school.
And I remember we were taught how to really colour. We started with an A4 paper and had to divide it into 16 or so squares. Each square would be filled with a colour.
At the start all we did was filling each square with just one solid colour of our choice. The idea was to make the outcome uniform.
That wasn’t too hard but what I really liked the most was learning to colour with gradients.
And you should be able to see in the 11 images I have presented above. I started off with the maximum force and at each layer I decreased the force I exerted onto the paper with the pencil. This way, the lion’s manes would have the grandeur of fiery gradation.
In many ways, there’s ‘less’ colours on the paper yet visually it’s much richer and meatier.
I don’t force myself to colour. The deer and the lion took me around a month to finish. I never worked on them every day.
I only did work on them whenever I wanted to. It could be in the morning, during the day, or before bed.
One rule of thumb is that everytime I feel the temptation to scroll, I have this internal monologue and tell myself that hey maybe I should work on the beautiful lion or deer instead.
And after a while of reinforcing this behaviour, I lost a chunck of my desire to get cheap dopamine from my phone. To be honest with you, I still do scroll sometimes, but certainly I don’t scroll as much.
So yeah I hope I have inspired you to go back to the basics and do a bit of art in your time.
You won’t regret it, I promise.
Barry
