Sketching to Go

In that other Moleskine, the Moleskine that doesn't take watercolor - the poor stepchild of my Moleskines - I am free. I can scribble, I can experiment. I do calisthenics with the pen, "zen and ink". Sometimes I just push the pen around without the mind getting in the way, like meditation or sleep, and create zentangles without angles, I guess.

So in this Moleskine I produce mostly, to put it mildly, garbage. And that's okay. Someday I may slather opaque paint on the pages over most of it in a delightfully creative way. But not any time soon.

Every now and then, though, something happens to bring it all together despite my best efforts to the contrary. One day, when I was aching to draw and had no time, while stopped at a traffic light, I drew the head and hand of a motorcyclist. Then the light changed. Now what? I decided to just do quick sketches of things I see (yes, at other stops and then anywhere else I happened to be). Unrelated things. Then on a whim I decided to box each of them, and suddenly the whole page came together as though it were a narrative for a story. Counter intuitive for sure - you would have thought that boxing the drawings would separate them!

Captain Elaine once accused me of Driving While Sketching (DWS), a ticketable offense no doubt. No Captain, not true - I was stopped at the light, honest. (And, well, look at Barbara Week's recent post!)

I like Wil's motto, "If you're sitting, you're drawing", and when I'm in the car I ain't standing, right?