I’m not a sports guy.  I don’t watch football, basketball or hockey.  Heck, I don’t even know the rules of hockey.  But baseball…ah…baseball.  I’m a sucker for baseball.  I do limit my watching to one team – the Toronto Blue Jays, but that’s 162 x 3 hours of TV watching from April thru September.  Lots of potential sketching practice time.

While I watch these games I use my laptop to keep up with email, write blog posts, and read other people’s blogs.  I also sketch, and sketch, and sketch.  Often I’ll just practice cross-hatching, drawing long, straight parallel lines, or testing pens.  I draw countless ellipses, draw odd shapes, shading them into 3-dimensional existence, and anything else I can think of.  Not only is it fun, it’s how I’m learning to draw.  I don’t think one can learn to draw by drawing final, formal sketches any more than a person learns to play piano by playing piano concertos.  You’ve got to practice the various parts of art, the movements of the hand, the proportions of things.

I’ve always done this sort of practice on photocopy paper, ultimately throwing the results away.  But I’ve bought a cheap Strathmore, 400 series “Drawing” book for this practice.  The other night I put my laptop next to me on the sofa, did an image Google search on “people” and started quick-sketching people from the images.  I thought I’d share the results.  Certainly nothing special and evidence that I need the practice, but it might be something you want to try as it’s lots of fun and certainly good practice.

Done with a Tombow 2558 HB pencil