Drawing animals helps you see them
They stood there doing double-takes like crazy, their heads rotating rapidly from side to side. I’m talking about the flamingos at Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines. I was zoo scrawlin' there earlier this month with my niece Anna and good friend Kelly. (A scrawl is a sketch-crawl – like a pub crawl, only sketching instead. If you think you might be drawing-inclined, check out master scrawler Danny Gregory.)
I don’t try to make a living by drawing, so the act of doing it is completely untainted by the need to go commercial with it. It reboots my head, gets me back to beginner’s mind, and simply fills me with joy. Drawing helps me slow down enough to see things I wouldn’t otherwise – like the tinker-toy knees of a flamingo or the perfectly patterned spots on a giraffe. And somehow the act of drawing helps fertilize my writing, which is how I do make my living.
I heard Joni Mitchell say in a TV interview a few years ago that for her, alternating painting with song-writing was “good crop rotation.” That’s how I feel about drawing and writing.
For drawing materials, I use Canson or Cachet black hard-cover sketch books with 100 pages of thick drawing paper; a Pilot Precise black rolling ball pen (fine point) for sketching directly (no pencil; no stops and starts; I draw contours first and just go with my mistakes); and a palette of Prismacolors on the lighter end of the spectrum, such as canary yellow, yellowed orange, light blue, and true green.
I don’t try to make a living by drawing, so the act of doing it is completely untainted by the need to go commercial with it. It reboots my head, gets me back to beginner’s mind, and simply fills me with joy. Drawing helps me slow down enough to see things I wouldn’t otherwise – like the tinker-toy knees of a flamingo or the perfectly patterned spots on a giraffe. And somehow the act of drawing helps fertilize my writing, which is how I do make my living.
I heard Joni Mitchell say in a TV interview a few years ago that for her, alternating painting with song-writing was “good crop rotation.” That’s how I feel about drawing and writing.
For drawing materials, I use Canson or Cachet black hard-cover sketch books with 100 pages of thick drawing paper; a Pilot Precise black rolling ball pen (fine point) for sketching directly (no pencil; no stops and starts; I draw contours first and just go with my mistakes); and a palette of Prismacolors on the lighter end of the spectrum, such as canary yellow, yellowed orange, light blue, and true green.
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