2014: the year of learning - MATS and maps. On my resistance to learn.

The week I enjoyed the most during the MATS course was the one dedicated to the editorial market. The assignment was to draw the map of a city in a way that could appear on a magazine. That means: Not a real, geographical map, but a drawing that would feature the hightlights of a city or town in an appealing way and that could illustrate a tourism article about that location.

Actually the assignment asked us to depict "our" city or town. But since at that moment I was in Zagreb and the capital of Croatia has become over the years one of my home towns, I picked it for my exercise.

The first drawing, a direct result of the sketch I drew on the plane while flying back to Stuttgart was this:

But I wasn't quite satisfied with the colour palette and the general tone. The woman looked too "simply happy" to me. I wanted her a little bit more sophisticated, like the women I used to see years ago in Zagreb, waiting for the tramway in perfect suits and shoes. So, this was the remake:

The colours were more "Zagrebians" and I liked the woman's face better. But still. Somehow it had too many elements. I stayed awake a whole night to get rid of some things and redo the rest. This is how the drawing looked in the morning:

I liked it much better. But see what happened: I asked my friends and followers in Facebook which one they preferred, number two or number three. There were a lot of Croats voting and the response was altogether quite positive. But all of them, Croats or not, were for number two. It won some 120 to 3 votes. I was appalled. So much night work for nothing. There were even some people going for number one, that I had posted before. They liked her obvious happiness. That confirmed one of Lilla Rogers' motto: "People by your joy", or the joy that a drawing irradiates. The thing is: I for myself still like better number three and in general I also like a sort of melancholy in drawings, mine or not. And then I ask myself if I am no good learning material, I mean: The course's name is "Make Art That Sells", then I am told joy sells and I still stick to melancholy. I don´t know. But I enrolled the MATS Bootcamp for the beginning of next year. There is still hope for me.

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