To Keep on Drawing

I simply love my Canson sketchbook. All the dry mediums - pastel, charcoal, coloured pencils work wonderfully in it and the feel of the medium on the paper makes me want to keep on drawing endlessly. Some of these pictures are taken from instagram feeds I follow where when I've liked a picture, I borrow the subject and end up making it my own by experimenting in my sketchbook. Most of these are explorations of shape and texture and colour, but hopefully in up coming blog posts, I'll have something more conceptual to show.

I've probably added this quote below in an earlier blog post, but I'd like to include it here again, more as a reminder to myself about how important it is to simply keep on drawing ~

If I had a single piece of advice to offer to any artist, it would be this: whatever your practice or medium, draw constantly. Be like the dancer, who never lets a day go past without a class. Draw as much as you can, wherever you can. Draw from observation (of course) but draw for practice too, from memory or from imagination, mark-making for precision or beauty-of-line alone, regardless of subject or likeness. Draw with pencil, with nibbed-pen, with charcoal or crayon or Conté pencil or biro. Draw with brushes and inks, or twigs dipped in watercolour or with old toothbrushes or the tips of feathers. Draw with anything. Subvert habit with new experience. Drawing can be for recording, but more than that it’s an expressive form that can be endlessly reinvented. Keep project-books and work at them even when the spirit doesn’t move you. Work in them out of discipline and respect for your art-form. They’re money in the bank for later, when you need the inspiration stored in them. Draw. Draw again. Never stop drawing.

Drawing is life.

~ Clive Hicks-Jenkins