I had coffee with a friend today.  He asked me if I’d been sketching.  I said, not since Monday morning when I went to a restaurant to sketch with friends.  I said that I’d been too busy with life stuff, including a trip to the doctor.  We moved on to other topics.

On my walk home, however, my two remaining neurons fired over this statement.  I thought about it and smiled.  We all have definitions of ‘sketching’ and, I guess, mine is that a sketch is something that I’ll post somewhere on the Internet and I hadn’t done any of those since Monday morning and I was talking to my friend on Thursday morning.   As George Takei is fond of saying “Oh my….”

It occurred to me that people who follow sketching forums get a glimpse of what we sketchers do and that this glimpse is false.  It’s false because we sketchers are picking and choosing what we post.  What gets left out are, obviously, the really bad screw ups.  BUT, at least for me, I rarely post any of the constant stream of quick sketches that I do every day, all the time, in a cheap notebook that I buy at the dollar store.

At the risk of embarrassment, I thought I’d give you a different ‘glimpse’ of what I do as a sketcher.  What follows are the pages from that notebook that I’ve doodled on over the past three days where I was “too busy” to sketch.  They were done while watching the news, watching a YouTube video, at the doctor’s office, and during the round trip to and from there.  I apologize for the poor scans as I did these quickly and the paper is thin/cheap.  There’s some ghosting and maybe some bleed through.  Afterall, “it’s just a sketch” (oh how I hate that phrase).

I hope you didn’t laugh too loud and that my already lowly reputation as a sketcher hasn’t been impacted too much.  Hand-eye coordination and the ability to ‘see’ come from continuous (incessant?) practice.  I’m always surprised at how many seem to have a hard time finding “time” to sketch as these couple dozen sketches were done over three days when I was ‘too busy’ to sketch.