Kinda Sketchy

Recently I’ve fallen down the Youtube rabbit hole of “How To” art videos encouraging me to put pen to paper and start sketching anything and everything. So I decided rather than wait for inspiration and try to put something awesome on every page of my mostly neglected sketchbooks (already a lost cause), I’d just start pick stuff from around the house and crank out quick and dirty sketches of it, skipping pencil work as much as possible and jumping straight to ink. I started in the kitchen…

That went well enough and I found it kind of relaxing just drawing without really caring how things came out. Plus there are so many millions of things I’ve just never gotten around to drawing since I’ve spent so much of my life doodling superheroes and cartoon characters.

Later I moved on to the suggested exercise of just filling a page with little drawings in boxes, on the theory that even if one (or most) of them came out badly, the overall effect would be cool. And I guess it kind of is.

Then I went off on another tangent, watching the stream-of-consciousness doodles on the “Peter Draws” channel and trying my hand at that. It’s kind of fun just starting any old place on the page and working my way out from there with no plan whatsoever. But it also goes against all my instincts.

Finally I decided to see what the online gurus could teach me about one of my most frustrating subjects, trees. I made some progress, I think. Maybe with repetition I’ll get to where I’m more comfortable with these things.

After years of beating myself up over never having any of my drawings turn out the way I want, I feel like I’m slowly transitioning to a mindset where it’s just something I do for fun, so who the heck cares how it turns out? And paradoxically that makes me fonder of what I end up with. Now when I see my doodles they’re not painful reminders of failed attempts at realizing grand plans, they’re happy little souvenirs of time I stole for myself. When I see them I can just think, “that was a relaxing afternoon.”

Anyway I decided to post these pages here just to incentivize me to keep working at it. Plus it’s been a while since I fed the blog monster a new post. In a week or so, we’ll be off to Nags Head so maybe I’ll get inspiration there.