i love sketches, even when like these, they go in the wrong direction. i love when they are incomplete and still mysterious.
when i set out to draw, my ideas are vague. it is not like athena coming fully grown out of zeus’s head. i am not copying out an image from in my head. drawing is rather more hiking in the woods and following a sense of direction. i know i am going over that way, because the text is like a loose map. i keep correcting my course with ideas of what i think i want, with what the text requires but mostly just with those little tugs of instinct. almost always i listen to music while drawing, which distracts the overly critical part of my brain enough that i can feel those little tugs and keep going. and keeping myself going is critical, because each mark, each sketch builds on the previous and it takes many many sketches to get to the right one. just like it can take miles of walking to get out of the woods.
but when i do get there i am often surprised and say to myself, “so this is what it is? is this what my work looks like? i hadn’t thought...”
