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Everyday Sketching and Drawing: Five Steps to a Unique and Personal Sketchbook Habit

Steven Reddy

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: May 02, 2018
Category: Art and Photography

Henri Matisse began his day by drawing circles with a pencil. He wasn’t aiming at perfection, or even accuracy. He was warming up, getting his hand loose.

Sketching is like that. It’s about the hand, not the mind. You see something, you start drawing. You don’t think about where this work will fit in the history of art. You don’t think. Period.

Steven Reddy is one of the Kings of Sketching. In the big time art world, that’s like being ranked #1 in Skittles or winning the Vermont Curling Championship. But for the likes of thee and me, it’s something we all can do, so it’s not to be sneered at. And Reddy has Credentials: He teaches drawing and illustration at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle and classes in drawing and sketching in pen and ink and watercolor for Craftsy. His specialty is detailed illustrations of urban scenes, cluttered interiors, and complex still lifes on location in ink and watercolor. And he has an unusual oil-painting technique: When he creates a sketch, he paints the entire drawing in black-and-white before adding color on top.

As he explained it to a local paper:

Reddy always completes his initial line drawings on location, often met with the shadows of curious bystanders. Emphasizing distortions and irregularities, he draws without any measuring tools and avoids pencil work. Inking from foreground to background, Reddy commits to every line, unable to erase his elegant pen strokes. This stage is his favorite. “You get to know a space really intimately,” he says. “You start noticing details in the ceiling, tiles on the floor, how things are stacked and arranged and the wood grain on a table.”

His sketches are… busy. “He will look at an utter mess of random stuff — a pile of trash, a cluttered room, stuff falling out of a backpack — and turn it into a unique still life,” a fellow sketcher has said. “He makes no editorial comments about which buildings might be more worthy of his scrutiny — they are all worth drawing.” [His blog is smart fun. To visit, click here.]

“Everyday Sketching and Drawing: Five Steps to a Unique and Personal Sketchbook Habit” is a refreshing counterpoint to books intended to put a writing instrument in your hand. There’s no jargon. No rules. Or instructions. Reddy’s point-of-view is a bear hug of approval: for him, you can’t make a mistake. “Drawing is merely pushing a pencil around on a piece of paper.” It’s not hard: “I’m lazy, so if drawing were difficult, I wouldn’t do it.” And: “You draw what you see, not what you know.” The benefit is huge: when you focus on the act of seeing, you see more. If 192 pages and 400 illustrations don’t inspire you, you are… oh… a writer. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]

Who is this generous man? A few years ago, when he had filled 60 sketchbooks dating back to 1979, he thought he had enough material to make a book. So he self-published Now Where Was I? A Sketchbook Memoir. (To see a terrific video, click here.] Then he self-published a 288-page sequel: This Is Then, That Was Now: A Sketchbook. He’s no capitalist: his first book cost as much to print as he sold them for. He didn’t care. As he blogged in 2014:

I need to carve out more time for drawing, but where? I’ve given up the guitar and sold the piano. I haven’t auditioned for a play since 2008. I gave away my TV 5 years ago. I don’t go to the movies (they’re all for teenagers, anyway). I quit my full-time job and teach the bare minimum I need to pay my rent and eat. When I scale back the yoga I turn stiff and cranky. I could drive more instead of walking everywhere, but then I turn fat and cranky (and driving is a drag). I could only shower every OTHER day, but I don’t think Donna would appreciate that. I could cut back on playtime with my super-sexy girlfriend, but then we’d BOTH turn cranky, so f that. Where does that leave me? Right where I am, and I go back to work.

No one who reads this book would say he’s in any danger of stopping.

BONUS VIDEO