The Power of Templates

I unwittingly performed an interesting experiment at home today.

I haven’t drawn animals for about 30 years. But recently my almost 3-year-old daughter began to have an immense interest on them and one of the 479,635 activities I have been doing to distract her during the social distancing is drawing. It generally goes like this:

- Daddy, please draw a cat! – and then I would take the verse of a sheet from an article I had printed in 2017 and I would try to draw a cat from memory.

- Daddy, now draw an elephant! – and I would try my best to remember the features of an elephant… Where is the tusk, really? The result, invariably, was not beautiful:

Today, while I was taking a shower the image of the horrendous elephant I drew to my daughter haunted my mind: "could I provide something better to my daughter?" Perhaps, if I find a simple picture of an animal on the internet, I can keep it in front of me while I draw and, perhaps, I will start drawing animals instead of monsters to Sophia—it cannot be too hard, just find an easy drawing and try to follow along the same lines of the original.

Then after dinner, as expected, Sophia came again:

- Daddy, draw me a dog!

Ok, I thought, but now I will try my new strategy! And the result was surprisingly good:

When Sophia showed the drawing to my wife, she was also surprised:

- That is beautiful, Mike! I didn’t know you knew how to draw so well!

And I said, “I don’t! I just found this original on the internet and stared at the image the whole time to try to copy it! I was so happy it worked!"

And now I have a new “profession” in this quarantine, Sophia’s personal artist.

After Sophia went to sleep, I began to think about what happened, and I remembered my undergrad students. Every time I gave them a new task, the first thing they would ask (in fact the second, the first thing was how many grade points the task was worth) would be: Professor, do you have a template? I confess that I always interpreted it as laziness from their part. However, there is a lot of wisdom in looking for (and at) templates: you leverage on past expertise—making your result (and grades) better!

I have always prided myself on my outstanding personal and professional creativity. However, a good lesson to be remembered is that the first picture is the result of my raw “creativity” whereas the second picture is the result of the same ability and intellect, but provided with a template.