One at a time

Without really intending to do so, I've finally begun a "daily sketch" habit. While I did a sketch pretty much every day before, and sometimes a lot more, I was never particularly worried about missing a day, or even a week. I always came back when I wanted to, and I have had no trouble filling sketchbooks. But recently I was looking back at all the sketchbook image files I have (there are many, many more than just the ones I've put on Flickr) and was having trouble sorting out when I drew which sketch--sometimes even which year. So I decided I would date each sketch in my new Moleskine so as to have some reference other than the day they were scanned. (I used to be not-so-diligent about scanning, meaning some sketchbook pages were a year old before being immortalized in .jpg form).

Anyway, I found that when I put the date on a sketch, it seemed too weird that there might be consecutive sketches that weren't on consecutive days in my Moleskine. I didn't like the idea of "gaps" in the books. The previous books have no gaps because they aren't dated, so they feel contiguous. The only way to eliminate the gaps and placate my obssession with continuity was to do a sketch every day. So I've been doing just that. Last week in Portland it was easy--there was always something new to draw. But now, sitting around the house, I've had to seek out subject matter to keep things rolling. So I've been doing single objects, which I'd taken on before, sometimes in paintings. These are from 2007:

It's been fun so far-- we'll see how long it lasts.