May 31, 2013

A Skill Everyone Should Learn: Sketching

I wish I could sketch well because it turns out that so many ideas start with images.

The question of what I wish I had learned much earlier on or even can learn now is very simple. Sketching. I just wish I could sketch well because it turns out that so many ideas start with images. A lot of these images are hopelessly abstract images. I used to think about cloud theory because I could see all my ideas as a cloud. But I didn’t know how to sketch any of this.

So what I’d love to think about now is actually taking time to become more artistic, learning how to sketch, learning how to draw. And I’m closer to being able to do photography, but it’s interesting how all these activities provide kind of a richer set of lenses to use to look at and interpret the world.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

First Radar Images Show Asteroid Passing Earth Has Its Own Moon

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be passing Earth today at 4:59 p.m. Eastern, at a distance of 3.6 million miles, or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.