Back to the sketching board
Sketchbooks are essential. There is no way around it. Sketching is like exercise, like meditation, like meditative exercise. Sketching is like yoga.
This may be why I sketch the same way I exercise...In cycles. Ideally, both would be a daily habit but instead, I do it for a while, burn out, lay low for a while, pick it up again. Every time I start again, it feels great and I wonder why I haven't been doing it. So, right now, I'm in the feeling-great stage of sketching. My illustrations gigs slowed down and I'm not looking to add new ones. The move and remodeling is mostly done. I can breathe a little bit. And sketching...sketching makes me breathe way slow. Nice, relaxed, yoga breaths. Inhale-2-3-4, exhale-2-3-4-5-6. Good.
I want more of it.
I recently read (more or less) three books that push for a daily art practice: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, Daily Painting by Carol Marine, and Art Before Breakfast by Danny Gregory. All of them deserve a separate review but none offered me a concrete solution. Sure, I'd like to have 30 minutes of brain-dump writing first thing in the morning, and I love the idea of meditative sketching first thing in the morning...but mornings aren't working for me. I liked doing daily paintings for a month. I will probably try it again in September, after Elijah goes back to school and I figure out a way to coordinate everyone's schedules so that mine includes some reliable art-making hours. For now, I'm just surviving summer and take every sketching opportunity I can find.