I sketch

For years and years, I've been envious of people who can draw. My art teachers to say the least were never excited about my work, and I gave up on art altogether for a long time until I stumbled upon art journaling and mixed media. But in my mind you had to have an exceptional talent to learn how to draw.

The other week, Leslie of Comfortable Shoes, posted this blog post about how learning how to sketch/draw takes practice and you need to stick with it in order to get better at it. You need to do the work, put in the hours, and develop a skill.

Boring, I know, because if you're like me you want to have the skill NOW, not develop it slowly over time. You want to be able to play the guitar NOW, not take lessons and start with just hitting the same boring notes over and over...

Annnyyywayyy....

I started to do some light sketching from memory, on a piece of paper I quickly grabbed one evening as I was watching TV, and the result was not half bad. Not as horrible as I remembered my sketching skills to be from when I was in secondary school. Maybe there was hope after all. ;)


I talked to Leslie about wanting to draw more, and she advised me to not use loose sheets of paper to work on, but bind them together so you can keep track of your progress. But at the same time you should not care too much about it, you're still learning...

Soooo... I took the front and back cover of a catalogue, glued them together so it was a little bit more sturdy, and some paper from my printer and binded it together with my trusty dental floss. So here you go, my very own, cheap as chips, sketchbook:


My Love and me went to the park yesterday, and of course I took my sketchbook and some magazines. Here is the first result, in simple mechanical pencil. Let's just say the sketch is 'inspired by' the photo rather than a picture-perfect copy...


But on its own it's not half bad...


I promise I'll keep working on it, filling out this sketchbook as I go along. I've got tons of magazines and if I can't find any more faces in the pile I've got there's always Flickr...