I’m always after more an better sketching but sometimes I find myself forgetting sketching’s purpose. It is not meant to make something beautiful, not always anyhow. A practiced artist, I think, uses sketching as a shorthand for working through form, connection points, composition, lighting, textures. It can be fast, loose, and messy. There is a beauty captured in the gesture sketch that can’t be found any other way. It’s only by rolling up the cuffs, forgetting precision, attempting accuracy, working fast, and moving on.
Here are a few artists that seem mindful of this fact:
http://www.debbykaspari.com/SketchbookPage.html
http://www.justinsweet.com/GALLERY/INDEXES/Drawings1.html
Two very different techniques represented in Debby’s and Justin’s work. Debby is a wildlife artist and her sketching is all about figuring out animal and vegetation form, changing lighting conditions, and you can see that she always has an eye for composition as she’s working. Justin is a character and concept artist working for video game companies like EA. His sketches are less polished and more exploratory. He’s searching for that form and most likely learning oodles in the process. His final color and black & white illustrations keep something of that dynamic that you find in his sketches: a beautiful thing, I think.
