1000 Dot to Dot books

The link

The 1000 dot to dot book: Cityscapes

What it is

“1000 Dot to Dot” is a series of books of very large ‘connect the dots’ drawings, with a theme for each book. Current themes include ‘art masterpieces’, ‘animals’, and ‘cityscapes’. Each drawing is printed on a separate page (with a blank flipside), and can be taken out for framing if you want.

What it means to me

I really like these books for two reasons:

1)      They’re playful. It’s often interesting to take something that ‘supposed to be’ for children and seeing how far you can push it, especially if you take the time and effort to do it right. I like that these books start at ‘really large connect the dots for adults would be neat’, but don’t stop there. Rather they move on to explore what kind of giant connects the dots pictures would make actual sense, and what people could use them for. Then, they actually delivered.

2)      These books encourage people to create. The back of the book says “…you will be rewarded with a genuine piece of art that you can remove and display”. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the ‘genuine piece of art’ part, but I applaud any effort to empower people to create things and hang them on their wall. Besides, after spending 30 minutes with a magnifying glass connecting a thousand dots, who’s to say there isn’t a bit of your soul poured into that paper?

I think the second reason resonates so much with me because I admire people who create and dare to put their creations ‘out there’, and because I myself often hesitate to do so. The “1000 Dot to Dot” book is a first step towards taking your own output seriously. It effectively tells you on the cover that the drawing you just spent a lot of time on really is good enough to hang on your wall. Hence, also, this blog: a small step towards being a net contributor to the world instead of just a consumer. 

We do expect artists to transcend following directions at some point, both in form and in spirit. At which point we can go back to reason 1, and draw huge connect the dots pictures because they’re cool.