to sketch for a minute

There has been a conversation going on the Quiltart list about sketching. Very timely for me as I have been trying to get at least some sketching done every day. I have been missing that activity in my life and it is beginning to pay off. Anyway, the discussion on the list has been very interesting, but as always it is punctuated by the "I can't Draw" dilemma. We need to be reminded that sketch and draw are both Verbs. You create A sketch, or A drawing, but without that helper word, they are both action words. The key is to do it. Draw and sketch, doodle, just get your eyes and hands moving even just a minute a day can help.

When I was still teaching Art, I had one middle school class that had a number of particularly angst filled students in it. They almost always had trouble getting to work, so I decided to give them some warmup time. I had each one of them make a small folded book from copy paper and keep it in their bins. At the start of each class I would give them one minute on an egg timer. They could draw anything or even scribble but they had to be making some kind of mark on a page of that little book for the entire minute. They thought I was crazy at first ( and I may have been ), but after a short time, they looked forward to it and even reminded me if I forgot to set the timer. The other part of this little exercise is that I never once asked to see what they had drawn, I simply called them on it if I saw then not mark making during the minute. Small scale and private, those little books began to make a big difference to those students. Not only in their class behavior, but the finished results of the official projects, and the guidance counselor told me later that grades for some of them went up in other subjects as well.

So, get out your egg timer, set it and get your pencil or crayon or brush moving. No one needs to see it.