Blog Post No. 2,000

1/3/12

I have at least a couple more posts planned as follow-up to my Portugal trip (including a report on how my sketch materials fared and symposium swag), but before I get to those, I have an announcement to make: According to Blogger, this is my 2,000^th blog post!

A writer my entire professional life and a journal keeper even longer than that, I have always used the written word to develop and retain ideas, record experiences, process feelings and thoughts and, indeed, to think. It’s been said before by other writers, but sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking until I write it. It’s a natural part of how I learn to understand my experiences.

It was only natural, then, that when I began learning to draw, I wanted to use writing to document this very new experience – a process that undoubtedly would be endless if I kept it up. And it struck me that I had a rare opportunity to document my own creative and learning processes from the beginning. That’s when I decided that a blog might be an interesting medium for that documentation.

 

8/30/13

When I published my first post on March 18, 2012, about six months after I had started drawing, I didn’t know how long I would keep the blog up or how often I would post. Even back then, trendsetters had long ago moved on to social media, and blogging had already been declared dead. Knowing this, I gave myself permission to try blogging for as long as I felt like it, but if it no longer interested me, I’d stop.

Six-and-a-half years and 2,000 posts later, I’m still blogging, nearly every day. Although I also share my sketches on social media, this blog gives me a permanent place where I can write about the sketch subject, how I made the sketch, the materials I used, or a story about the circumstances. While others may have let their blogs go because posting on Facebook or Instagram is so much easier and faster, I still have a need for more space and time to develop a thought. Indeed, I want to think a little longer than the 30 seconds it takes to post and hashtag a sketch.

 

3/18/14

While I always intended for this blog to be mainly for myself, it’s been a genuine joy to “meet” readers along the way – the ones who occasionally or regularly leave comments; the ones who email me privately about their own sketching experiences; and the ones who find me among hundreds of symposium attendees to tell me they are readers. Many thanks to all of you – even if you’re silent! – for sharing my journey. (I especially appreciate your readership because, despite much troubleshooting and frustration, I have never been able to get the email subscription tool to work on my blog, and yet you keep returning.) And the journey continues. . . for the next however-many-thousands of posts.

I hit my 1,000^th post on March 27, 2015. You can read about that milestone here.

 

2/3/15

(What do the sketches shown here today have to do with my 2,000^th post? Not much. I have a folder on my computer containing hundreds of sketches I haven’t shown on the blog, usually because I had nothing to say about them at the time. I still don’t, but this post is a rare excuse to show them. I picked one randomly from each year that I’ve been sketching.)

3/11/16

3/30/17

2/3/18