Me

This is the first drawing I did after deciding to add illustrations to my journal. I immediately followed the newly acquired inspiration to draw instead of waiting to start a new journal. So the last few pages of my previous journal have some of these drawings. The paper in that journal is colored 25% cotton charocoal and pastel paper, thus the dark background. This is what I look like in crocheted doll form, except drawn badly.

It was surprising how unnatural drawing felt to me after not drawing regularly for years. In certain ways I hit my artistic peak in my teen years, possibly early twenties. As a teenager I was a perfectionist and wanted to achieve realism in my pencil and charcoal drawings. Nowadays I'm happy to doodle quickly.

I almost always use a pen now. For many, the idea of using a pen is a little scary since you can't erase. Many years ago I thought the same, but I quickly overcame that through practice. Now, if I make mistakes, they are Bob Ross happy little mistakes. If a drawing sucks like this one, I just move on to the next.

I'm not at all happy with this drawing. It looks sloppy, and the proportions are off. The head should be bigger to match the subject. My head isn't quite that large, but it is in my yarn form.

The encouraging thing is that in just one month I feel like my drawing skills have returned to at least 40 to 50 percent of their level when I was doodling last, briefly around 2017. That period was when I was living up in Spokane and I ate at Wendy's often. I would sit there and draw after I ate. I made a friend who worked there. She asked about my drawings, so we ended up talking often after that. I made her a journal, and she made me a pen pouch.

My ability to render shapes properly took a huge hit after not drawing for so long, but if I continue this new illustrated journal practice, I'm sure my drawings will continue to improve. This is one reason I like keeping even my worst drawings. It helps me see that I do improve over time. Some sketches are just hideous, but others turn out satisfactory.

There is another friend I should talk about. She made the yarn version of myself. I would talk about her all the time, but I sense she prefers not to be talked about much. She was also part of what inspired me to get back into drawing. While watching that Sketchbook Skool video was the final nudge I needed to get started again, there are others who deserve credit as well. This friend never lost her drive to draw as I did. We have been friends for twelve years, and we originally met due to her writing a comment to me about my drawings. She occasionally asks if I have drawn anything lately, and she has asked if I used my Derwent Inktense pencils yet. Generally my answer has been a disappointing "no" and that I haven't felt inspired to draw in a long time.

Now I finally have a different answer, and my first drawing was appropriately inspired by something this friend made. I think I used a pigment fineliner and colored pencils on this one. I drew it April 4, 2025. Rather than my normal signature and date near the drawing itself, since the drawings are in my journal, they are under the date heading for that journal entry, so I don't really date them near the drawing.

On a side note, it took me a long time to scan these drawings in! Though I'm using Linux now, Linux doesn't have good drivers for my scanner, so I had to log into Windows to do the scanning. My scanner works on Linux, but at an annoyingly limited resolution. Since these drawings are super small, I needed to scan them at a higher resolution. Plus, while GIMP is usable for certain things, I generally don't like it a whole lot. I have Affinity Photo on Windows, which is far superior. Since it was already going to take a long time to work on these images, I wanted to save time by using Affinity. The heal brush and inpainting tools are incredibly superior on Affinity compared to GIMP. I decided to clone out the writing that surrounds these drawings in my journal so they are more isolated for posting on my website. This took a long time to accomplish and is the reason I wasn't posting these sketches closer to the day I drew them. I'll try to play a little catch up...