I’m working on an expansion of Fractals You Can Draw transforming it from a pamphlet I wrote in the space of a week to something that could be used in a 6-9th grade math class. I want the book to serve not only as an introduction to fractals, but as a gateway to other interesting areas of math, and even world culture.
But at the core, the book still needs to be fun to draw.
I’m heavy in the research phase of this book and for the last few weeks I’ve been studying a traditional form of drawing native to Southern India (in the Tamil Nadu region) called Kolams.
Kolams have a lot to teach the casual math enthusiast or the serious math student about fractals, symmetry, context-free grammars, hexadecimal encoding and countless other subjects. They also can be kind of tricky to draw as you can see from my increasing lack of skill from top to bottom. All of these are theoretically able to be drawn free-hand as one long continuous line, but it takes practice.
I keep free-hand notes in part to test the difficulty level of what I’m expecting people to draw. Even in the original series I drew a couple of the images, and the little red-haired girl handled the other two, which gave us both a sense of how long it took to draw each image and some of the difficulties involved. I’d known how to draw all of the fractals in that series of posts for years, but it took actually trying to draw them by hand before I really knew how they worked.
What I’ve learned from drawing Kolams is that it takes a lighter, freer touch than is my natural inclination. And maybe gel-pens that smear easily aren’t the way to go either. You can make some pretty images very quickly, but you need to get a sense of the flow as you draw, or you can easily go off track (as I did multiple times on the bottom image).
More generally it is important for the writer to be able to take a step back and engage with whatever they’re writing as a their final target audience. Especially when you’re down the rabbit hole of research, it can be easy to lose a sense for how easy or difficult a particular subject is, and you need to take the occasional application step back. This is good not only for assessing the level of difficulty, but also in solidifying the theory behind what you’ve been studying. There were properties of how Kolams were drawn that didn’t gel in my head until I’d tried to draw a few.
You are your first beta reader. It’s still important to get outside perspectives, but trying things yourself helps you discern what should actually be included in the first place, and what should be left out. Engage with your work in different ways: read it aloud, read it out of order, try to actually follow your how-to directions without any outside info, color in your coloring book, etc. Whatever your genre, there’s more than one way to look at your book, and there’s value in gaining that new perspective.
You can read the original Fractals You Can Draw series here or check out my other book from Green Frog Publishing, Adult Coloring Book: Fractals (adultcoloringbookfractals.com) with cover art by the little red-haired girl.
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 