My daily sketching habit and how it all started

When I decided that I wanted to get back to my creativity getting in touch with my roots and doing things which I loved more. I found the urban sketching society and started my journey of self discovery. I then started taking online classes and traveling to urban sketching symposiums, which in turn aided in the act of getting back to sketching and living a more creative life. That was all fine as long as I had courses to attend and places to go to. Counting all these events in they would all total to an amount of few days or couple of weeks of sketching in the scope of a whole year. What about the rest? Would I only be active sketching and learning when the opportunity presented itself ? The answer was obvious to me and it was simply not enough.

That’s when I realized that I needed a daily practice to keep me in the loop of things and active all year round on daily basis. Experimenting with various sketchbooks, trying different approaches and ways to figure out what to sketch was daunting. Getting back to daily life also meant not being able to get out and sketch anytime I fancied. Sketching in bigger sketchbook intimidated me and the fuss of setting up, attempting to fill the pages crippled me.

Scrolling through the net I found many people using a small Daily Moleskine Pocked Diary to sketch on. It being a diary meant it was dated, which in turn meant I can’t skip a day. The size of it almost the palm of my hand meant it needn’t that much to fill. It also meant less pressure to make it perfect and most of all removed the saga of making the habit a big theatrical affair that could be easily left behind. All it simply meant is few minutes a day and done. Right? Well not at first!

It took time for things to progress, for the pages to evolve, take shape and the feel they have today. It started with sketching interesting things that happened that day or a memory I wanted to document joined by annotation to accompany each sketch and the visual journal of my life was born. The one I refer to as snippets of my life! The more I sketched the more I got hooked. At first I would skip many days but then feel guilty and go back to redo them and keep up to date. Nowadays I am almost always on track, meaning sketching a day or two up to five in one sitting. Always making sure that pictures are being taken on daily basis for the memories that would end up in my Moleskine!

My next goal is to integrate this as a daily habit not coupling few days in one sitting. I am still working on that one!