The thing about sketchbooks

Keeping a sketchbook is like having a jogging routine. It keeps an artist in shape, literally and figuratively. I went through some years buying sketchbooks but not putting much in them. You really have to get used to carrying them around with you. Then you have to get used to opening them and making marks there...

A great deal of what I do in a sketchbook is what I would call stealth sketching. That is, the people I'm drawing are not aware of what I'm up to. The guy above was sitting about 15 feet from me in a Starbucks while he read a tabloid paper. The young woman was farther away on another day in the cafeteria on the lower level at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The baggage train was observed out a plane window as we sat out a delay at an airport in Alaska.

The thing about all these subjects is that you get used to drawing pretty quickly and economically because you don't know when someone is going to get up and walk away. Or, as is frequently the case, they just shift and alter their poses enough to make things difficult.

Many life drawing classes have a routine in which they begin with very short poses. some as brief at 30 seconds. I like starting with poses that are somewhere between two and five minutes. After a few rounds of this moving to a ten minute pose seems like you've got all the time in the world.

I like drawing on simple white paper with a soft (2B to 6B) pencil. I like the pencil soft so that I can use the smudgy quality of the graphite to some effect in the drawing. A small piece of chamois helps.

I fill up a sketchbook about every four to six months and the books I've been using in recent years now fill up the better part of a shelf. I still join other artists on the weekend at the Art Students League in New York to draw from a model on weekends but it's important to me to keep going during the week as well. Some days ten or fifteen minutes is enough.

But without it, I feel my rendering skills begin to atrophy.