One of the hardest things about learning anything is figuring out how to practice. Or even what it means to practice. Repetition is often key. But you don’t want something that sucks all the joy out.
I’ve been teaching myself to draw for a few years. I had improved a lot, but for a long while recently was going nowhere. I’d tried lots of books and courses, and filled endless pages with boxes, parallel lines, figures and other “practice”.
But something clicked when I started sketchbooking earlier this year. I’ve filled five books now, and I’m just starting a sixth.
The sketchbooks led to a shift in mindset. Rather than trying to practise, I was engaging in a practice – scribbling. Whiling away the hours with the books became something in its own right, rather than a means to an end.
For a long time I was a little scared of sketchbooks. I used pads where I could tear pages away and start afresh. But I took a sketchbook on holiday to Hobart in February. I painted the boats as I waited for lunch, the post office as the afternoon light faded.
The scribbles weren’t all good, but they have become part of a whole. I’ve been hooked ever since.
I started carrying a sketchbook everywhere. I scribbled my breakfast, the fruit in the Guardian’s office, other people on the train. The books also became a way for me to work through stuff, such as when my wife had a health scare and was in hospital for a weekend. As we waited endlessly to find out what was happening, it was a safe space where I could just be.
I spoke to Danny Gregory, a writer who blogs and makes videos about sketchbooking, to try to figure out why I had become so taken by my new practice.
“We think about practice in drawing like practice in piano, where you have to play scales, or you have to do drawing exercises,” Gregory says. “I’ve always hated that. It feels really academic. It’s not expressive.
“But if you think about practice in other terms – like a yoga practice, or legal or medical practice – with those kinds of practices, you’ve learned some stuff, right? You’ve studied the law, but then you put it into practice.
“It’s not preparatory. It’s active. You’ve taken these thoughts and ideas and principles, but now you’re engaging with them and you’re using them on a regular basis. If you keep a sketchbook, you’re not practising so that you can then do a painting, in my mind.
“I’m doing it because that is the practice of the practice, you know?”
I have now filled two sketchbooks just with portraits – more than 100 scribbled over a couple of months. And it’s like Gregory says; I wasn’t doing portraits as studies for some other portrait in the future, but just to do portraits.
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Gregory has a bunch of similar stories, such as the sketchbook he started to fill the time it took to make his morning cup of tea.
“A lot of the time I was just sort of standing there. Or I was looking at my phone. So I thought, well, I’m going to just put a sketchbook next to the kettle,” he says.
“I would just draw my tea cup. That same tea cup every morning. And I filled the whole sketchbook. Same pen, same everything. And you know, my drawings were slightly varied. But really, my goal was to do the same drawing over and over and over again.”
In my most recent sketchbook I challenged myself to include people on every page. Used to drawing ghost-town versions of Melbourne (and Hobart, as above), the first few pages were a real struggle.
But I started varying my morning coffee routine to find new places where I could capture life.
My latest sketchbook will tackle the bane of all my drawings – hands. I’ve always struggled drawing hands.
It’s early days, but I’m not dreading it as I would have before. Because drawing a bunch of hands isn’t just practice any more. It’s the practice of practice.
The books aren’t a magic bullet. This won’t look the same, or work the same, for everyone. But to me the books are just a private, finite space where I can experiment, explore, process and remember.
