Happy March! I had so much fun writing a fresh flash essay about my doodle last month that I decided to create another one to share. 🤗
“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene”
I almost wrote this reflection yesterday afternoon, but I was hungry and promised myself that after eating I’d get right to it. And then, I just needed to pay a bill quickly and I’d sit right down and write. And then, I remembered a time-sensitive email, and then…well, you know the rest.
Yesterday’s writing didn’t happen.
Alas, I had the “perfect” hook pop into my head yesterday, but tonight is no longer yesterday. So, scrap that. My tone today is different, and my hook has evaporated like a cartoon bubble. So be it. This reflection won’t be about whatever that would have been, and that’s okay, too.
Earlier this week, I also promised myself some time to doodle during a break, and I did follow through on that intention. I decided to try to draw a scene—a whole interior SCENE!—which I haven’t attempted since…probably middle school. Yeah, it’s been a hot minute.
I usually doodle one thing at a time, or parts of a scene, or words/phrases paired with a mini doodle or two, but to fill a whole sheet with myriad elements kept my brain and my hand hopping.
I put on some music, broke out a coffee-table book filled with gorgeous photos, picked the one that called to me most as a reference photo that I then adjusted as I went.
I started my scene on a scrap piece of newsprint paper I bought online this summer in a jumbo, 500-sheet package.
There’s something about knowing that I’m not going to save the first drawing because it’s on the kind of paper that tears when an eraser hits it that frees up my creativity. Nobody will ever see this first sketch so, who cares? Onward!
Without contemplation first, hand motions of pencil on paper are often quite soothing.
I try to get that way about more things: that not skipping ahead to envision outcome. Sometimes, my creative process lands, and I don’t stop to examine or even to think about forming whatever I’m creating until I have a draft or five. Those are the best days.
More often, though, my mind loves nothing more than just to keep skipping ahead. Ahead, ahead, ahead!
I’m certainly not the only creative to find my process varies like this. Depending on my day, my mood, how tired I am, how hungry I am, fill-in-the-factor-here, the challenge of crafting something is either easier than imagined, or more frustrating than imagined, or (most frequently for me) somewhere in-between, but it’s rarely the same type of journey more than once.
Each piece needs something different of us, like every friend, like every life circumstance.
My original sketchbook scan in all of its uncropped glory, spirals and all.🤗
So, my interior scene (which I also drew in pencil first, free-hand, on the sketchpad page and then traced with felt-tipped marker and pops of color from watercolor pencils) has some walls that are certainly not architecturally sound, a baseboard that shouldn’t look like it’s cutting through one of the plant’s fronds, some picture frames that are crooked despite practicing perspective, and a chair that I’m pretty sure doesn’t even resemble a chair.
On the other hand, I got the happiest kick while drawing the arched doorway between the rooms that reminded me of more than one friend’s home, and drawing the little locks on the big bay window, and then having a light-bulb moment about adding in a pop of life-giving green on the plants, and attempting some splash of light across the floors, and making the one rug a sisal rug with squiggle motions, and then drawing lines for wooden floors, my favorite flooring—all, nothing but joy and in the flow.
The floors!
The wooden floors. That’s right—I was going to write something about those yesterday.
There was also originally going to be something about the lemonade I tried recently and loved. But today’s reflection needed to be the way it turned out here—about the challenges (for me, anyway) of drawing whole scenes in scale and with perspective but doing it anyway, and something about the comfort of putting elements together that make an interior that becomes exterior, which is also, pretty much, what we do when we create, whether it’s a conversation, a painting, a poem, a dance, or a birthday party. So be it.
On the balance, not bad for a cozy interior. Not great or professional, but not shabby, either. Onward!
