My First Pandemic Sketchbook Filled

Four months of pandemic sketches

Ever since I stopped binding my own sketchbooks last year, I haven’t been ritualistically showing my sketchbooks as I finish filling each. I am this time, however, because it feels important and even poignant to mark it this way.

The sketch on the first page was made on March 15, just a few days after Gov. Inslee started closing down the state. The pandemic had begun to feel real. We had taken a walk through our neighborhood, where everything seemed so normal that it was hard to accept that something terrible was happening. I sketched a very mundane traffic circle where daffodils bloomed, giving me hope and optimism (though nothing else did). The next day I felt so much fear and anxiety that I had to calm myself by spontaneously drawing my hand (and that became Day 1 of my ongoing hand series).

As I page through the book, every sketch done on location, almost all within a mile from home (and one no further than our driveway), I can clearly recall my feelings as I made them. The sketches toward the beginning of the book were made almost furtively. (What if we have a full lockdown like other countries were experiencing? As an “unessential” activity, would urban sketching be outlawed?) Vulnerable, tentative, hesitant: I don’t know if my feelings show in the sketches, but I remember feeling them.

As my anxiety decreased over time, I found ways to sketch safely in my quiet neighborhood or in my car, and I made a conscious decision not to let fear keep me from doing what I love most.

A fresh sketchbook, stickered with attitude.

It took me more than four months to fill this softcover Stillman & Birn Beta, which, during a normal spring and early summer, I would have filled in half the time. Of course, I am also sketching in several small notebooks while out walking, and I sketch at home in other sketchbooks, so it isn’t that I have been sketching less (in fact, I think I’ve been sketching more than usual). But typically, whatever main book I’m using for urban sketching is a meter for the pace of my life. When I’m traveling, I fill several pages a day. When I’m sheltering-at-home, not so much.

I was about to put this Beta up in the bookcase next to the others. Before I did, I slapped the masked Weather Bunny sticker on the cover as a reminder of its contents. 

Then I cracked open the next sketchbook.