Your 3rd Grade Teacher Was Wrong: You Are Creative (And It's Time to Prove It)
We all have that moment.
You were 8 years old. You were drawing a horse. It was a magnificent horse. It had 5 legs and was purple. And then an adult walked by—maybe a teacher, maybe a parent—and said, “That doesn’t look like a horse.”
In that moment, a little part of your soul curled up and died. You decided: “I am not an artist.”
Twenty years later, you’re a Senior Backend Engineer. You write beautiful, elegant, scalable code. But you tell people, “Oh, I’m not creative. I’m logical.”
Bullshit.
Creativity isn’t about making a photorealistic drawing of a horse. It’s about making something that wasn’t there before.
This workshop is about un-learning the trauma of “being good at art.”
The “Art Scars”
I have yet to meet a tech worker who doesn’t have “Art Scars.” We are trained to be correct. The compiler screams at us if we miss a semicolon. We live in a binary world of Pass/Fail.
Art doesn’t pass unit tests. Art is messy. Art is ambiguous. And that ambiguity terrifies us.
This workshop is exposure therapy for perfectionists.
The Curriculum: How to Make “Bad” Art
1. The “Ugly Drawing” Exercise
We start by making the ugliest thing possible. We try to fail. Liberating? You have no idea. Once you abandon the need to be “good,” you are free to be “honest.”
2. Materials as Teachers
- Clay: It fights back. It’s tactile. It gets under your fingernails. You can’t Cmd-Z clay.
- Paint: It blends. It makes mistakes. It drips.
- Collage: It’s refactoring for reality. Taking broken pieces and making a new whole.
3. The Witness Circle
This is the hard part. You hold up your “ugly” art. And nobody critiques it. Nobody says “the perspective is off.” They just say, “I see you.”
It creates a psychological safety that is almost nonexistent in the tech world.
Why This Matters for Coders
“Steve (or Wingston),” you ask, “why should I care about finger painting? I have a Jira backlog.”
Because your brain is stuck in a loop. You are solving problems with same neural pathways you’ve used for 10 years. Art forces you to open new lanes.
The best engineers I know—the absolute 10x wizards—are often musicians, painters, or woodworkers. They understand that systems are just art with constraints.
Join the Resistance (Against Perfection)
This isn’t an art class. We won’t teach you perspective or shading. We will teach you how to stop hating your own output.
Warning: You may get paint on your hoodie.