I've been trying to come up with something with the appropriate amount of gravitas to say for my first post of the year. This has been unsuccessful, so now I'm just going to say something and move on.
This year, the main goal is to stop thinking about shit so much and instead make like Shia LeBeouf and just do it. This is particularly pertinent to my art — I made some progress in overcoming my aversion to "wasting" sketchbook paper last year, but I've noticed I'm still not immune to the pressure to find the perfect scene or reference to draw. This eats up a lot of time that could be spent doing literally anything else.
At some point in the future, I might be mentally stable enough to do something more measurable like daily drawings. As it is, I'm a completionist, and having any concrete evidence of days that I've failed to do [x] thing only makes me more likely not to continue doing [x] thing because I've already gone and fucked up my record anyway. For now, I'll just do what I can when I can (and make an active effort to find the time).
On the topic of finding the time, I've started pulling out my sketchbook and drawing something around me whenever I feel the impulse to check my phone. Most of the time, that "something" is a mundane man-made object, so I can't waste time looking for something photogenic. Also, sometimes it sucks. It's fine!
Spontaneous travel sketches done in green pen (Platinum Preppy 03 inked with Diamine Evergreen). Left: A sketch of traffic done while waiting in traffic. Right: A sketch of a table at a mall coffee shop.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm feeding into the online sketchbook consumption problem by posting pages, even bad ones, here, but this is a shitty unserious blog that I don't really expect anyone to look at. If it stops being that, I'm dead and have been replaced by a body double. Happy new year!
Two drawings of sunflower bouquets in brown ink and alcohol marker. The marker was used in single-colored rectangles surrounding each of the flowers. The drawing on the right features black eyed susans and uses yellow, light and dark green, and orange. The drawing on the left features lilies and uses yellow, pink, orange, and peach. The author is bad at flower identification and can't tell you much about the rest of the flowers.
I've been faffing around with a Sailor fude nib I bought a few weeks ago. Fude nibs are bent upwards so they provide line variation as you change your pen angle, similar to a brush or brush pen. I'm still pretty bad at using the nib intentionally, but it does cool stuff if you mindlessly draw with it. You can block in color really fast with it, which is awesome but also requires frequent dipping, even with the built-in feed it comes with, because that is a fuckton of ink.
I think fude lines are bold enough to stand on their own, but I plonked the marker on top to make things more fun!
I've been thinking about my sketchbook in terms of "how" instead of "what": I pick a medium or color palette I want to experiment with or improve at and dedicate the entire spread to that. It's helped me avoid succumbing to perfectionism-induced decision paralysis because I just think about cool stuff I want to try instead of getting stuck on making a pretty picture.
Drawings using one ink and water. Left: A coffee cup drawn with Diamine Pick Me Up, a brown ink, and Diamine Safari, an olive green ink, used to draw its own bottle. Right: A tree drawn with Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, another olive green ink.
I've avoided dabbling in ink drawing without drafting with a pencil underneath because the thought of putting ink on the page without a plan fills me with irrational dread, but that changes now! (The avoidance is changing. No guarantees on the irrational dread.) This is also my first time doing plein air drawing, so there's excitement all around.
