On Sketching (and the Life-Cycle of Artistic Ideas)

I find that many gardening metaphors apply to artistic creation. For example, harvest season is not a year-round event. First you prepare the soil, then plant the seeds, and then care for the plants as they develop over time. Artistic ideas follow a similar path. They grow best in a rich soil, formed by days spent absorbing and engaging with other art, new ideas, and life experiences. Like plants, new ideas start as small as seeds — little drops of inspiration. Not all will grow. The ones that do require time and care, the artistic equivalents of watering, fertilizing, weeding, and pruning. In this short essay, I'd like to focus on those "seeds": how to find them, plant them, and care for them. For that early stage in the life-cycle of artistic ideas, the greatest tool in the artist's toolbox is sketching.

More than anything, sketching is a mindset. It's your opportunity, as an artist, to safely flirt with failure. Just as some seeds will never grow, many ideas will have no life within them. With only a casual glance from the outside, it's impossible to know what may happen. Sketching is your opportunity to sort the duds from the ideas with promise.

Because failure is involved, I find that the "safety" aspect of sketching is crucial. The safest way to sketch is to work in private. If you're working in public, you're a lot less likely to take on something that's a potential (or probable) failure. You'll take fewer artistic risks, and as a result, you'll be less likely to arrive at truly new ideas, which is a primary goal of sketching. In my own practice, I keep my sketchbook and digital sketches private, even from friends and partners. I find that just the potential that someone else may see the sketches may trap me into playing it too safe. I may choose to selectively share my sketches later down the road, in the right context, but privacy is a great default.

Beyond simply sorting the good ideas from the bad, sketching helps you to produce ideas in volume. While you may naturally encounter some ideas at random moments in the day, the easiest way to find ideas is to put yourself in a state of active artistic creation. In one hour of sketching, I can produce as many new ideas as might normally occur to me in a week. And, the quality of the ideas only improves as I get warmed up. I'm not the only artist to experience this — I've heard many others express the same sentiment.

It's quite lucky that ideas tend to come while sketching, because that's when you're best equipped to effectively record them (as a sketch). It's also when you can most quickly sort the ideas into the good pile or the bad pile (through sketching). That’s why a big part of the "sketching mindset" is about working quickly and roughly. It's not the time to get bogged down by polishing details. It's the time to figure out if there's promise or not. To discover if the idea speaks to you. Give it a try, and then move on.

Now, a note on sketching materials. It's important to understand that sketching (the mindset) has nothing to do with working on paper, or even with working physically. You can sketch in any medium. Some artists suggest that you sketch in whatever medium you use to create your finished works. I think that's good advice, at least some of the time. I think there's also value in playing with different media in order to access new ideas. With that said, the most important aspect of material choice may be around how comfortable it feels to fail. Working with expensive or precious materials can cause you to tighten up, fearing that you might "waste" them. When sketching physically, I've had great results from using the most worthless materials on hand, like newspapers, magazines, and junk mail. If I hate the results, I can crumple them up and trash them with zero regrets. That's very freeing.

One final thought on sketching: make time to look back into your past sketches, months or years after they're made. As an artist, you will continue to grow, and your set of artistic ideas will deepen. Occasionally, a sketch that seemed like a failure at the time was simply missing an ingredient, or a different perspective. Seeing that sketch again may prompt you to imagine a new way forward. Your sketchbook, whether physical or digital, represents your lineage as an artist over time. It can remind you of how you got to where you are now, and it is full of ideas that you can branch out from as you move into the future. There’s no other artistic resource quite as valuable as that.

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