Sketchbooks are Not Precious

One phenomenon I've noticed while sketching alongside friends and peers is that there is a certain trepidation or anxiety about making marks in a sketchbook without taking painstaking precautions beforehand. It's easy to worry endlessly about the first line put down on a page - as though that first line is resolute in its indication of the efficacy of the lines to follow. I am still guilty of this, from the time that I sit down to take a sketch, it often takes five minutes for a line to actually appear on the page. But once the first line is drawn, it's like an invisible wall breaks down and suddenly pulling my pen across the paper becomes a fluid and almost trance-like exercise.

A sketchbook should not be precious. Because if something is precious, there is an even greater anxiety of screwing it up by adding to it. Be fearless, be careless, let your hand and eyes enter a meditative dialogue. Record what you see, improvise what you don't. Draw. If you don't like the result, draw it again another day. Not every sketch is going to be masterpiece. In fact, few if any ever will be.

One method of alleviating this first-line anxiety is to give yourself a very limited amount of time. Draw something in 15 minutes. This is helpful for many reasons actually, because by restricting the amount of time, you are forced to simplify and condense - to extract what is most significant within a composition and gesturally suggest detail.

Fill up your pages. Makes mistakes. Laugh about them, learn from them. The only bad sketch is one that never makes it past the first line.

This doodle got a little out of control and took over the whole page. I was combining elements from many different building styles, so the final result is a complete mess.

I stumbled upon an anti-racism protest on campus today. Apparently there were some violent racial slurs used against people of color at a fraternity event this past weekend. Around 60 students gathered on the Terrell Mall to silently demonstrate against these acts.

It was an interesting juxtaposition of events on the mall, as there was literally a hotdog stand set up adjacent to the group of protesters. On one hand there is this silent demonstration against very real and harrowing prejudice, and 5 feet away there are groups of students joking and laughing loudly as they barbecue hotdogs and serve student customers.

It was a challenge to capture the sense of a dense group of people like this, and ultimately, each person ended up being represented by collections of scribbles. The second sketch shown here was very difficult as I was sitting maybe twenty feet from the demonstrators, and people were constantly passing by and stopping in front of me, obscuring the view I had already mapped out on the page. I had a good chunk of time before I was meeting my roommate, so each of these sketches took around 40 minutes apiece.