Drawing Desire Paths.

...and a really good bin.

Hey Folks! Welcome back!

Right, that’s enough welcome back chat, let’s get straight into it:

This week I drew a little comic about desire paths.

Here’s a few I’ve taken photos of over the years…

At first glance, desire paths don’t really feel like anything. It’s simply just a well-trodden shortcut. But, once you know they’ve got a name, and are a whole thing, suddenly you’ll see them everywhere and they’ll start to represent a kind of mystical manifestation of human decision-making, designed by no single individual, yet designed and built by all.

These paths come in various forms, in most cases, they’re simply a diagonal shortcut, often a narrow dirt trail that’s been gradually excavated through a grassy lawn by thousands of busy footsteps all desiring to cut the same corner and save precious seconds on their trip to the shops.

What’s really interesting though is the people who might not have cut this corner if it weren’t for the existence of the desire path in the first place! (See? now it gets philosophical! Once you go down this path, there’s no turning back!)

I think my favourite version of this is the non-shortcut versions, the ones that don’t quite make sense at first glance, like this path tactfully and superstitiously walking around this power pole support…

From an excellent post on 99% Invisible on Desire Paths.

The very idea of desire paths is such a strong concept that the lovely and talented

Daniel Giacopelli

has devoted an entire newsletter profiling people whose lives and careers have veered off on interesting desire paths of life.

You should absolutely go check that one out and jump on the subscription list!

And so, if you didn’t know what they were before, now you do, and now you’ll notice them everywhere and do the same thing the rest of us do every time we see one…

So, onto the comic!

First up, here’s the initial sketch idea for the comic:

So, let’s do a ‘behind the drawing’ kinda analysis here.

There’s always a danger with a comic as big as this. It’s TWELVE DRAWINGS! Nobody has that kind of time, which is why it sat on my desktop for about four months until eventually I had another job big enough to avoid which caused me to finally do this one in a desperate fit of procrastination.

(Yes, I am still avoiding that job by writing this post)

But, moving on! In retrospect, I think a strong inspiration for this comic is undoubtedly R Crumb’s ‘A Short History of America’, which redraws the same scene as it slowly progresses through decades of gradual, inevitable and depressing development.

(It wasn’t until looking it up that I realised that I’ve also opted for the twelve images in a 3 x 4 grid arrangement as well!)

The great thing about doing this kind of drawing is that you’re essentially redrawing each panel based on the one before it, and so once you’ve found the energy to draw the first panel, the rest of them tend to come about with relative ease, until eventually, you end up with a complete comic:

Thankfully, after four months of procrastination and all the hours of drawing and colouring and shading just the right colour for ‘a path that isn’t a real path, but now isn’t a path but you can still just kinda see it’ I finally posted it and thankfully it’s turned out to be quite popular and well worth all the effort.

Also, one last thing before I go. CHECK OUT THE DETAIL ON THE BIN!

This bin didn’t need to look anywhere near this good, but I put a few highlights in, and then some nice shading and suddenly I was cross-hatching the inside and ended up drawing what I strongly suspect to be the best bin I’ve ever drawn. Exciting stuff! what a start to the year!

Oh, and before I go - the comic is now available as a poster should you work in a council office and are looking for some wall art! You can find it here.

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If you’d like to receive more exciting stuff like the philosophy behind a non-descript dirt track or me bragging about a very well-drawn bin, you should sign up to OUTLINED and get it all straight to your inbox! - You can do that here:

Other than that - as always, leave comments or give this thing a share and I’ll be back soon with a new edition!