Finding Joy in Sketching
Here’s the old and the young of it. Sometimes you can take great joy just in the process of sketching. It exercises the brain and the hand. You try to capture a feeling with pencil and paper. It helps to keep your powers of observation sharp. It helps to keep the drawing in your muscle memory. You’re practicing capturing value, angles and shapes. It helps to practice capturing those things so that when you are sketching directly onto your watercolor paper, you’ve got it. Someone in a workshop I attended asked how do you learn to draw the figure? This is how you learn. It’s not an easy way but it’s a doable way. You take your sketchbook with you and you sketch people. You sketch their posture, their hands, and their faces. The more you sketch, the better you get. You can see it in the history of your sketchbook. The improvements are right there in the pages of your sketchbook. So get out your pencil and sketch.
