A Practice and a Discipline: 365 Days of Sketching

12/7/14 (from photo)

When I first started sketching in the fall of 2011, I committed to trying to sketch every day, but I also told myself that if I sometimes fell behind or just got so busy that I couldn’t manage a sketch one day, I wouldn’t beat myself up over it. As a result, I’d sketched almost every day, but occasionally when the weather was bad, and I didn’t feel like going out, I didn’t do one. Or if I’d had a really hectic, busy day, and squeezing in a sketch just felt like too much “work,” I gave myself a break. That’s how it went the first couple of years.

On Jan. 1, 2014, I tried something new. I again made a commitment, but this time I made it to draw every day for a year (“Draw or draw not – there is no try”). I didn’t want it to become a chore – another to-do item to check off – and I didn’t want it to become a mundane habit that I do because it’s good for me, like flossing or taking a calcium supplement.

9/13/14

I decided to think of drawing as if it were yoga. (No, I’m afraid I don’t do yoga daily . . . I can commit to only one daily thing at a time!) I’ve been taking weekly yoga classes for more than four years. My instructor says yoga is both a practice and a discipline. We work regularly on poses to become stronger and more limber gradually – that’s the practice. The discipline is more about an internal focus. We sometimes have to work through movements or poses that are not easy or comfortable; we challenge ourselves and work from the inside outward.

9/16/14

With drawing, the practice is the physical act of putting pen to paper every day and building skills gradually. For me, the practice part is pure pleasure – I love sketching, so doing it every day is fun and not hard work at all. But if sketching is also to be a discipline, it can be hard work. The discipline part would be to challenge myself and sometimes draw things that are difficult or uncomfortable, because that’s how I would grow.

Initially I thought I would announce my daily drawing commitment here on my blog to “keep myself honest,” be accountable to my readers, etc. But the commitment I made was to myself, not my blog readers, so what would be the point? I decided not to announce it.

5/8/14

I didn’t necessarily intend to post every sketch. One criterion for my blog is that if a sketch has a “story,” then it’s worth blogging about. Let’s face it – some sketches were just so mundane or ordinary that I couldn’t drum up a story for them, so they stayed in my sketchbook without being posted (a few of those appear here today).

On many days, I ended up making more than one sketch, usually when I went out with other sketchers and therefore spent a couple of hours in one location for that purpose. But on days that I made two or more sketches, I didn’t take the next day off. The objective wasn’t to make 365 sketches; my objective was to sketch every day.

During the best of summer, I got out to sketch on location every day for many days in a row – an urban sketcher’s ideal! I can also recall a handful of days when my schedule was crammed and I really didn’t have time for a sketch – but somehow I managed to find 5 minutes to dash off a quick one before going to bed. Those tended to be sketches of writing instruments that happened to be on my desk or portraits from catalogs I grabbed out of the recycle bin (a couple of those appear here, too).

5/8/14

Today is Dec. 31, and I am happy to say that I sketched every day during 2014. Most of those days felt effortless because the practice – the part that contains the pleasure and fun – took over. But I also remember some days that took quite a bit of effort because the subject matter or technique pushed me out of my comfort zone. For those, I had to exercise discipline – trying to push past my usual limits to grow and become a stronger, more limber sketcher. Whichever way I looked at it, as a practice or a discipline, the result is the same: Drawing every day is better than not drawing every day.

Tomorrow is Jan. 1 – day 1 of the next 365 days of sketching.

Happy New Year and happy sketching to all of us!