This last June and July I’ve spend travelling in the US. A great experience, and it was nice to take such a long break. Expending your horizons can be so refreshing. While some things are similar there’s lots of new things to discover.
On the first day there I started to sketch something from my day, like a visual diary. I love making photo’s, but to be honest, once we are home and the photos are on my computer, I hardly ever look back. With drawing you take the time to stop and notice the small things. You look closely, a vast difference from quickly snapping a photo and moving on. I liked this about drawing so I decided to keep doing it every day of our time in the US.
The first days it was hard to slow down, hard to find the peace of mind to just sit and draw. But by keeping at it it got easier and easier everyday.
Since then I’ve been drawing every single day, 97 days in a row.
Drawing ordinary things from life really improves drawing skills, and you start noticing things around you and better understanding them.
However, after coming home after this trip I wanted to keep the momentum going, but somehow daily life seems less interesting.I finished my sketchbook filled with daily observations. But when it was time to start a new one I decided to change things up a little.
I loved the daily drawing but I felt I ran out of subjects (I could have gone out to find them of course, but I liked the fact that it somehow integrated in my life instead of adding extras. It takes quite a bit of time drawing everyday like this. If you have to add more trips to find subjects it wouldn’t leave any time to get some actual work done.
In the meantime I longed to make some personal work, but couldn’t find the time. Voila! The solution was there. I’m making a small personal work everyday in my new sketchbook.
I’ve been making personal work in my new sketchbook for 14 days now, and I’m loving it. Keeping it small makes it easier to just do it everyday. The illustrations surprise me to be honest. I do have days where I really don’t know what to draw, but by just keeping at it it somehow works out.
It’s a great challenge to sharpen my composition skills, speed up my process and learning more about what I love to draw (which seems to involve a lot of animals 🙂 )
I believe that inspiration fuels creation and creation fuels process.
As Dory says in ‘Finding Nemo’: just keep swimmin’… just keep swimmin’…