#scribbling engine

But when you get good at what you're doing, and can start to make things happen with deliberate and conscious intent, it gets more complicated. Things still don't always do what you want, or work like you expect, and those occasions are sometimes frustrating and often useful. With some attention, you can make mental notes of what happened, so that next time you can do it on purpose. As you map out what you know, you can also do deliberate experiments with unknowns, again keeping track of what happens, thereby expanding the limits of your knowledge.

And sometimes, armed with all this useful knowledge, when you set out to do something totally familiar and well-known, you accidentally pick up the No. 63 gear instead of the No. 64 gear, because they are right next to each other, and instead of drawing a quick three-pointed pattern you realize that you have embarked on a dense thirty-two-pointed pattern instead. It’s a mistake. A small, “Oops, I picked up the wrong gear” kind of mistake. It takes you off in a direction other than the one you intended, and in this particular instance, resulted in a drawing I like a lot. But it was still, without question, a mistake. I had started to make another in the series illustrated by the two drawings above, and instead ended up making a different kind of drawing with similar colors.