Three Sketches
Three sketches, one from a wedding rehearsal.
One of my simple ideas for improving my sketches is this: keep sketching.
In practice, this means that some of my sketches are hasty and simple. I am not in the least bit ashamed of them, because each one is another moment in which I was actually sketching.
As with almost everything else, practice teaches better than waiting for time to do things perfectly. Doing a little now beats dreaming of a time when you can do a lot.
When I teach others to make nature journals, I often begin by having them make random marks on a sheet of paper. There, I tell them. That sheet is now a mess, which means you’re free to do whatever you want with it, and you’re also free from the silly hope that this, your first sketch, will look like a photograph.
Here are three pages in my sketchbook from the last few days. One is of quick line gestures while waiting for a friend to meet me for lunch at Bread and Circus in Sioux Falls. Another has a few quick sketches of a dog named Fred who was waiting for his man to finish his coffee at M.B. Haskett. The third is one that I made yesterday in Yankton, South Dakota, while at a wedding rehearsal. I am not part of the wedding party, but my wife is the officiant, so I was free for an hour or so to capture the interior of Christ Church, one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the Dakotas.
They vary in detail, and you can see one of them has watercolor paint on it as well. They took me between a few seconds and an hour to make. And they all belong in the same sketchbook, because the aim was not to make great art, but to make me a better observer. In that regard, they are all equal successes.
Now get out there and make some marks on a page. And don’t worry about what they add up to. They add up to you getting just a little better at making marks on a page, and at observing the world as you do so.
