Practice Sketching

I've always enjoyed drawing but I never felt good at it. It was just "doodling" for me. But a couple months ago, I came to the conclusion that the only reason I wasn't good at drawing was because I never practiced. I'm not going to wake up one day being able to paint. It'll take practice.

The hardest part about practicing is knowing what is the right level of challenge. On my trip in France, I took some time out to relax and just draw the Airbnb we were in. My first attempt sucked. The ceiling was too tall, the table was at the wrong angle, it was bad. So I took a photo and practiced sketching off of the photo.

I was pretty happy with the sketch, but when I attempted to color it, I became much less satisfied with the result:

I realized that there are a lot more lessons that I needed to learn between sketching and painting. So for now, I've resolved myself to focus on sketching. And more specifically, sketching smaller, less complicated scenes.

After reading some articles and watching some videos, I realized there were a couple aspects that I needed to practice. A big one being to learn how to see; actually taking note of angles, lengths, colors, and shapes.

So with that in mind (and because I have limited time), today I did a 10-minute sketch challenge where I drew the same scene (my bedroom) in 10 minutes, again in five minutes, and then attempting to do it again in one minute. My biggest surpise was how much could be drawn in five minutes.

I'm still early in this journey, but figure I should document the process. I'll keep getting better, one sketch at a time.