How Creative Streaming on Twitch Killed My Doubt
My noni is an oil painter. She spends days detailing still life paintings, shading fruit and piggy banks until her knuckles swell with arthritis. She sips coffee with non-dairy creamer and mixes her paint shades with care, always keeping in mind the color wheels she has ingrained in the lobes of her brain.
I draw weird portraits in Adobe Photoshop. I used to draw them with sharpie in composition notebooks. Occasionally I stole some art paper from my noni’s art supply cabinet and prayed she wouldn’t notice. That space was untouchable in our household, but I was broke and wanted paper. Noni shared everything she had except the tools of her craft, and I understood her for it. I remember her sitting at our dining room table with a glass of red wine, scolding me for invading that space. It didn’t stop me from taking supplies when I could.
Most of the time, my drawings lived in the margins of my homework assignments and work schedules. I saved them on a USB drive plugged into the end of my fingertips and kept them there. They didn’t get much room to breathe and I rarely gave them any air. They stayed under my skin for years, building new layers of dust and polish simultaneously.
Me sketching in a graphic design course my freshman year of high school.
Photo courtesy of Tyler Childs.
I took some drawing classes at community college my freshman year, where I struggled with traditional art styles. I could learn to shade and use perspective, but my odd line work and disproportionate style always shown through. I didn’t really try to stop it from doing so, I didn’t see the point. Some teachers marked me down for it, others embraced it, but either way I was left feeling inadequate compared to my performance in other courses, and especially compared to my noni. She’s never fully known how much her opinions mean to me.
When I showed her my artwork, she told me, “You’re a writer, not a visual artist.”
She said I “just wasn’t born with that skillset.” These were words she would never have said to any of her art students when she was teaching, but I was held to another standard. It’s not that she wasn’t supportive. She has a file cabinet in her bedroom closet with all my writing going back to elementary school, tabs arranging my assignments by year, her favorites in individual folders or plastic sleeves.
She has a romanticized idea of me being a novelist, despite my never saying I wanted to be one. I scrawl poems and stories beyond stanzas have never been my strong suit. When I tell her of my worries for my career after I get my bachelor’s degree, she brushes it aside saying “you’ll be a writer.” I don’t want to be one, I’ve said this, but that idea still hasn’t settled with her.
I sat thinking about my relationship with the idea of living off of writing and how much I hate it on a late October night. It was early in the week, probably a Tuesday or Wednesday. I scrolled Facebook instead of doing my homework to distract myself from it, a habit that had gained momentum with every additional semester of my time in college.
I saw a friend of mine post a status about how they were “streaming” art on some website called Twitch. I’m not sure if it was out of curiosity or procrastination, probably both, but I clicked on the link. I was surprised to find a livestream of digital illustration, watching someone detail a sketch of penguins with a scrolling chat box to the side. It was surprisingly calming and stimulating at the same time, and I became almost immediately immersed in creative streaming.
Twitch originated as a videogame streaming website, where gaming enthusiasts would come together to watch each other play videogames. The idea of watching another person’s hobby for your own enjoyment was absurd to me until I realized the joy I found in watching other artists create.
The “creative” channel is fairly new, added to Twitch in 2015, and features a range of activities, from 3D modeling to digital illustration, watercolor painting, and computer building. Seeing the variety in the work reminded me of the drawings I’d left in that USB drive under my fingertips, and the skin there began to itch.
An example of the creative channels on Twitch. Photo courtesy of Patrick O'Rourke.
I started streaming after a few days of watching other creative streams. It was a 180 degree move for me. I had barely shown anyone my writing that I was assured by multiple teachers throughout my schooling was good, let alone the drawings I always received mixed reviews on. Twitch gave me the desire to throw myself out of my comfort zone and see where it took me.
My first stream I made “face melts” of a few of my friends and a choice image of Donald Trump (now president-elect, then presidential candidate), manipulating their pictures in Photoshop to create jarring, distorted faces. It was all pretty casual and the interactions were minimal, yet there was something in the streaming that creating a confidence in myself I didn’t know I possessed. I guess as human beings we crave validation from other people, and I denied this until I realized the positivity I harnessed from it.
A finalized “face melt” of the glorious Joan Rivers.
By the next day, I was drawing on stream. Something about the atmosphere forced me to create at a different pace than my norm and with a rhythm that changed how I approached my work. I loved it. I felt energized and rejuvenated, that validation working at my serotonin levels and manifesting itself in my illustrations.
I didn’t stutter or end stream when internet trolls harassed the chat box, and I brushed off jabs at my “juvenile” art style. It was all part of the performance element of streaming, and as someone who can barely give a speech in class or order my own food sometimes, I wanted to feel this new confidence in myself every minute that I could.
My favorite digital illustration so far, Cubicle.
I found a validation in streaming I could never harness from my relationship with the amazing oil painter I’ve been blessed to have as a maternal figure. My short time on Twitch made me realize I needed to stop searching for her validation that I craved, as it was unachievable, and to accept her expectations and my aspirations as lines that would never draw parallel to each other.
My noni gave away all of her paintings for free after she no longer cared to try and get her work into galleries. Months and years of work now hangs on the walls of her loved ones, the detail of her bristles preserved in cozy New England living rooms next to antique chairs and throw rugs. Arthritis prevents her from painting now, and I can see it eat at her, but she gets by with sketches. I hope to one day fill my life with the passion she had for mixing her yellows and oranges in a wooden paint pallet, and send some of it her way when she can’t create as much as she’d like to.
For now, I stream on Twitch and procrastinate my course assignments. The separate validations that come from streaming and my interpersonal relationships mirror each other in my growing confidence. I’m going somewhere with it, and for once I’m more concerned with the growth of this craft than the final product. My illustrations are growing, the USB drive shedding skin from my fingertips with every completed work. I’d say that’s progress.