I'm halfway through Inktober and here's what I've learned

Fur is hard to draw

This week at a social gathering, a friend walked up to me and said, “So, the artist is here.”

I looked around. It was the same old crowd as far as I could tell. I didn’t see anyone I knew who was an artist, but what do I know about what people do with their spare time?

“What are you talking about?” I asked. My brain was trying to leap into social gear and mostly failing to catch up.

“You!” my friend said. “The drawings you’ve been doing and posting!”

“Oh, that,” I said. I probably waved dismissively.

After all, I am not an artist. It’s not an identity I wear around. I’m a writer, sure. Are writers artists? I’ve never even been clear on that.

What is true is that I’ve been doing my best to make one sketch a day as part of Inktober. Daily sketching is something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s an aspiration. I like the idea of doing something with my hands besides typing on a keyboard. I like the idea of drawing as a way of paying attention. I like the fact that it’s not something I’ve ever felt particularly good at, which means some of the perfectionism I bring to writing falls away. I like the idea of doing something in those in-between moments that isn’t looking at my phone. I like the idea, as

Amy Stewart

said, of proclaiming myself an artist-in-residence of a particular place. I even like the way the sketches look sometimes.

I think downtown Madison is easy to draw because the buildings are so distinctive. This is the view from the coffee shop.

Also, when Inktober started this year I was in a place where I hated writing. I felt stuck and lost and just blah. Why not pick up a pen for a totally different purpose?

Now it’s Day 14 and here’s what I’ve learned so far.

- Drawing might require more patience than I have. It takes so much time to make a sketch, even a sketch of what feels like a relatively simple thing. I thought one day I’d draw my cat, tucked up into the big comforter at the end of our bed. I could do the shape of the cat, but the fur? Are you kidding me? One, I realized I had no idea how to draw fur. Two, I looked up a YouTube video and realized drawing fur is sort of involved. The video was sped up because, turns out, drawing fur takes forever.

Fur fucking sucks.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not spending hours on these sketches. But there’s a level of concentration over a period of minutes that feels scratchy and uncomfortable to me. Is that because I’ve become so accustomed to the easy effortlessness of picking up my phone? Is it the same weakening of my attention that sometimes makes it hard to read or write or, you know, have a fucking conversation? Or is drawing just, you know, hard?

I’m hoping this impatience begins to fade as the month goes one. Fingers crossed.

- Art is amazing. The drawing kind of art, that is. Writing sucks. Writing is so cerebral. You have to translate things into words and then put them on a page and then someone else has to read them. Writing is so fucking mediated. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Drawing, though, feels amazing. The voice in my head as I’m drawing is, not surprisingly, saying things like, “That looks nothing like a doorway.” As I’m doing the drawing, there seems to be no way any of these lines will cohere into something decipherable. I mean, really, how is anyone going to tell that’s an umbrella?

I really like the way the umbrellas turned out here.

Then I take a moment and look away. Or I move further back. I look at the sketch again and some kind of miracle has occurred. Those lines did become a doorway! Or an umbrella. It is nothing short of magic. Just like, how the fuck did that happen? And how did I do that?

- This wonder especially applies to shadows and shading. I’m not always so good at including shadows and shading. I have to remind myself: “Right, where are the shadows here?” When I’m putting them in on the page, they look ridiculous. Little scribblings. Cross-hatches. They are incoherent, but when I’m done, they are everything. They make the image come alive.

No doubt there is a science of the way our eyes work and vision and art that explains this, but I’m content just to be amazed.

- I wanted to do Inktober partly as a way to pay more attention to the world. As a writer, I pay attention to what people say. I pay attention to the way they move. I don’t always pay great attention to how people look. I mean, I remember faces. I’m not very good at describing them.

I don’t know if I’m doing any better with that. It’s only halfway through, so maybe it will come.

- I still very much have to make myself sit down and draw something. Many days, I leave it until night and then suddenly remember. Some days I’m annoyed by having to take the time out of my day to draw something.

This is all to say, it’s not yet a habit for me. I don’t even know if it’s something I look forward to. I’m happy to have drawn something. I don’t know if I’m at a place where I always enjoy the drawing itself.

Of course, I don’t always enjoy writing, but many, many days I do. I enjoy filling a blank page with words. I enjoy editing. I am at my most content when the words are flowing.

I’m not there yet with drawing. Maybe it will come. Maybe not. Maybe I’m not an artist, after all, which is totally okay.