Draw Your Tools Wrapup
It’s over. It’s done. Thirty-one sketches/drawings of pens, nibs, one knife, one notebook, and one phone. It was a good challenge for myself, but it was also a little repetitive towards the end, that’s for sure. Over the course of the month, I jotted down little notes and observations to post later, and without further ado, here they are:
1. Finer is better for the majority of my drawing work. Yes, this feels like “duh”, but it wasn’t something I had really given thought to until I started this project.
1a. Converse: Broad nibs are still really helpful for getting ink on the page for most of what I do. A wet, fine nib is probably the most helpful tool, though.
2. Practice makes faster - Somewhere at the end of the first week, I noticed that I could move my sketches from 2x to 1.75x or 1.5x. It makes sense, but it was still cool to see that practice take effect so quickly.
3. Nibs are really, really hard to draw. They’re symmetrical, they’re detailed, and they really, really benefit from a little abstraction. Maybe I could improve that if I were working with finer nibs, but I literally only own one true EF. I think.
4. The time is there. It’s an easy excuse to say “ah, I’m too busy for something like this,” but the time to sit down and draw was a lot easier to find than I had expected.
5. Drawing begets drawing. It seems cliché to say, but once I started drawing more, it gave me more confidence to go and draw other stuff, too. They weren’t crazy drawings or anything, but plenty of little ghosts and things graced my notebooks over the course of the month.
6. A little variety is important. By the end of the month, I was pretty bored of drawing a long, mostly straight thing with a little point on one end. I had some of the most fun with the drawing of the Hobonichi, just because it was a change of both perspective and subject.
I feel like I could keep going; there was a lot to learn from my first ever real attempt at any sort of art challenge. But those are some of the key points, I think. Overall, I’m glad I did it, but I’m also glad it’s over.
I did, by the way, record most of the drawings I did. Most of them I pulled to a 1.5-2x speed, but I put them all up on YouTube, in a playlist. If you find yourself wanting something to put on in the background, you can check that out here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf9K8X82WP1rq6nJ2iBhlCEy63IhiO8dp