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.