It's really important for an artist to have a sketchbook on hand as much as possible, so you can draw from life wherever you are and so you can record spontaneous ideas that you might lose if you waited. For someone who's been drawing my whole life, my own track record of keeping a sketchbook used to be pretty sparse, and that probably has a lot to do with why I've only been able to produce pretty amateur-level work.
A sketchbook is also important because you need a place where you can try out bad ideas without having to worry about what people will think. And a safe mental space like that is essential for combating the perfectionism that has held me back so much. The nice thing is that when you do come up with something you really like, you still get to show it to people. So here is some of my stuff from a few years ago. This is the period where I was really starting to get into the habit of carrying a sketchbook around and actually using it. I actually had a hard time with it at first; you certainly won't see any of my best work here, but I do think the stuff I put in my sketchbooks says a lot about me as a person.
This was also long before I had taken a figure drawing class, but I had worked through a few figure drawing books in high school and I knew that I really enjoyed doing it. It was one of many, many things that I wanted to be good at but couldn't commit to the necessary practice for. Most of the appendages here are my own; the one on the bottom right is my friend's foot.
These drawings were for a class assignment where I had to illustrate a narrative about myself. I love Calvin and Hobbes, and since I look a little like Calvin I figured that was a good place to start. The drawings in the top right cluster were actually done by my teacher; he was showing me how to translate the same drawing style into something more applicable for drawing adults. Part of my narrative included someone angrily throwing wine at me, so there's also that. (Don't even ask.)
You may want to click on this one to enlarge it, because it's annoyingly small here. This is a combination of my more realistic drawings. Most of these were done from life; the kayak and the candle were done from my imagination and the temple near the bottom was done from a photograph.
The vast majority of my older sketches, though, were just a bunch of nonsensical cartoons (which makes sense, since as a kid a lot of my drawing experience came from copying The Far Side comics):
The nonsense comes in varying degrees, from little anecdotes about things that happened that day (or about someone's skin-walker grandma turning into a bear) to visual puns to commentary about Mormons' apparent inability to keep their hands off each other in the middle of church services. I feel like the drawing of a rocket shooting into a giant nostril is the culmination of all of this. The drawing of the woman sitting down is the only non-silly thing here; I mainly just included it because I had already compiled all my other drawings of people and forgotten about this one, and there was an open space here. Whoops.
Apparently I think about food a lot while I'm drawing.
A little nonsense goes a long way in describing what's usually going on inside my head.
I think this page speaks for itself.
I also draw a lot of cartoon animals, and evidently there are some patterns, like tyrannosaurs saying "rawr" and various animals trying to eat my friends. Like 90% of my animal drawings are dinosaurs. I really like dinosaurs, if you couldn't tell.
When I was a kid I invented a team of crime-fighting penguins I called the Battle Penguins. I once tried to make a comic about them... I failed due to a combination of not having the patience to work on a big project and the fact that I had no good reference material, having literally never read a comic book before (not counting comic strip compilations, which I read almost constantly as a child). The penguins, however, are still adorable, so I kept drawing them.
I'm putting the people last, because only toward the end of 2010 did I start doing them really regularly. I was terrified of creeping people out my unsuspecting subjects, but I eventually figured out that most people thought it was cool if I drew them, not creepy. So I started doing it more. This is pretty much how I learned to do a good likeness of someone, which I used to really suck at because, well, it takes a lot of practice and I hated practicing. It was always embarrassing when I screwed up a portrait of somebody and then they looked at my sketchbook, but since nobody reading this will know who most of these people are anyway, there's no way to tell how badly I screwed up anyone's features. Bwahaha.
I didn't include everything, but that's my best stuff from a year and a half of sketching. That's a long time and not a lot of drawings, but it picked up as time went on. At this point I had considered applying for an art major but was afraid to try because I didn't want to be rejected. I knew I wasn't all that good, but I was still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the reason why was simply because I wasn't drawing enough. In the end I definitely feel like I'm better off with what I studied instead, but I'm also glad that I have finally accepted that even the most naturally talented person needs to practice, a lot, in order to accomplish anything really impressive. I think the results of that practice will be evident as I post more of my sketches.