Still Sketchy Out Here!
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Still Sketchy Out Here!
Still Sketchy Out Here!
I told you I would have more to say! I am very excited to see that some people are joining in with the sketching. My mother has participated in the 30 Day Sketchbook Challenge for the past few years and is doing so this year, despite the fact that she has been sick with some sort of nasty cold sort of illness. I told her I admire her for continuing on. I usually post my sketches not only on the Challenge Face-Book page but on my regular Instagram and FaceBook, too, and have noticed a few people have picked up pencil and paper, as well.
So far I am doing well with keeping the sketches simple and quick, and mostly in pen, although I use a pencil to do a little blocking in of major shapes first. Yesterday I did a very quick pencil sketch of one of my dogs and to my surprise it was the best dog drawing I have ever done—lending credence to “less is more” when it comes to sketching. I have been reminding myself that this is a sketch challenge, not a finished artistic creation challenge and is more about the process than the finished product.
One day the prompt was “Something Made of Paper” so one participant drew a stack of sketchbooks and said she had filled all of them while sketching every day of 2023. See? That’s what I want to do. Maybe it will work to aim for my own stack of filled books in December 2024. I certainly have all the blanks I need!
When I was a teenager, I started shopping for sewing supplies when my family would take our annual road trips. We would get to a city and I would get out the yellow pages and look for fabric stores. For some reason my parents always indulged me on this and took me all over the place looking for fabric stores. As I got older, I have added in yarn, embroidery supplies, and now art supplies. This past September I spent a whole day in London with a friend from Devon shopping for yarn, fabric, and art supplies—and I came home with some of each! Those are the kinds of souvenirs I like. In addition, friends and family have started giving me sketchbooks, and my mother has even made a few for me. Now I MUST fill them with sketches, paintings, drawings, and doodles, right?
As I have said over and over, I am no artist in the way people normally think of artists. But I do have a busy brain and would like to keep it that way. The Bible talks a lot about idle hands, idle lips, and idle minds being problematic, and like everything else in the Bible, I have found that to be true. Drawing and sketching is one more way to keep the bad guy away and to keep my brain happily engaged, which is bound to be good for me….and everyone around me as I can get cranky when I am B-O-R-E-D!