If you are like me, you have probably spent entirely too much time mindlessly scrolling Instagram Reels, or worse, TikTok. I boasted for months how I’d never downloaded the short-form video app, feeling good about myself for not succumbing to such an obvious, mind numbing waste of time and plausible pys-op concocted by the Chinese government to distract and dumb down the Western world. Meanwhile my screen time on Instagram has skyrocketed thanks to their Reels and Explore pages. Some intellectual I am.

But something that caught my eye lately in the bottomless pleasure pit of Reels were time-lapse videos of people drawing with pencils. Namely a trend where artists do a rendition of the same object at different “levels;” IE how realistic they were. Through watching this enough times the reality of their process finally slapped me across the face. Every incredible drawing I have ever seen started as faint sketch lines. These lines are darkened and added to, erased, and drawn over layer by layer, until the almost perfectly photo-realistic pencil sketch is done. Reflections of light being done in lead. It really is unbelievable.

This is not new, earth shattering information for me. I was fortunate to have an incredible art teacher in junior high and my grandmother is quite skilled in many physical mediums. I know what it takes to make a great piece of art. The time, concentration, light touch, good planning. However, as stated above, I am not always so keen to see errors in my own judgment. And I have reverted to my childlike thinking of how good work gets done when it comes to my own.

Even before taking a real drawing class, I always liked drawing things as most kids do. When we had recess indoors due to bad weather, we would sometimes sit around the lunch table and doodle away on spare sheets of lined paper. It always frustrated me so much though to see some kids almost absentmindedly leave the paper covered in what I considered very good renditions of every day objects or even people. I could never do that. Just sit down, doodle, and have a realistic depiction of anything left behind. Proportions were always off, lines crooked, lettering wonky. So I usually tried to trace things. That could be done in one fell swoop and leave you with a good picture at the end. My grandmother even gave me a book about drawing, filled with pictures of hundreds of exotic animals and cars and instructions on how to draw all of them. I used up all of the tracing paper included with it before finishing a single attempt freehand.

Through this book and my class in junior high, I learned the ins and outs of good drawing. And got better at it. Decent enough that I was no longer upset at the kids who could freehand almost anything off the cuff. I had taken part in the process and saw what they could produce at the end of a semester when they were more diligent than just scribbling on a notebook. They had “it” when it came to art class; I did not. Oh well. Drawing, painting- these are not my passions. I could move on from needing to be “good” at drawing.

I want to write. And unfortunately I have drifted back mentally to wanting to trace things over, even though I know what great artists need to do in all mediums to create incredible work. A great painter doesn’t feel shame at the faint lines and blends that underlay the masterpiece. Tolstoy didn’t feel bad about his first draft of Anna Karenina. The rough cuts from the music studio don’t define the final cut of a song. Even the most skilled and inventive cartoonists and comic book artists, who have been drawing the same characters for years, begin with light sketches.

(All of this being considered also makes me realize how incredible tattoo artists are)

I have to start with sketches. And overcome the fear any current and future criticism thereof, because sketches aren’t meant to be the masterpiece. That’s what this blog can be- good sketches that hopefully improve over time. I don’t mean to say posts here are going to be half-baked and poorly edited. Yet not everything I consider “done” is going to be the best post ever written. But it will be done, out of my head, and somewhere else. I have to spend more time at the easel.

For any of you that are reading along- thank you. I hope that this can turn into a great tapestry someday, with these first posts being the necessary outlines laying underneath.