New, blank sketchbooks are intimidating.
I tend to self-edit when there’s no Undo command. If you only put the good ideas down, then you’re improving the quality of your output, right?
Except, it doesn’t work that way. The only way you get to the good ideas is by having dozens of bad ones. And the good sketch always comes after you get the bad ones out. You’ll never get to the good one if you sit there, waiting for it.
It’s a kind of flow, and it means giving yourself permission to suck.
Sometimes, you don’t really internalize that permission, though. So, some tools help. That’s what was so freeing about capturing ideas on index cards; you can toss them out if they don’t have any value. There’s no missing page in a notebook.
But three by five is a pretty limiting sketch size.
I just got a Dot Grid Sketchbook from Behance, which is a lovely, lightly-gridded sketchbook… with perforated pages. It’s a nice pressure relief valve. I’ve been sketching much more, recently. I have permission to suck.
Interestingly, I haven’t actually tossed a single page so far. I doubt I will. It’s just that the safety of it makes me more likely to try.
On the blog end of things, well, that’s just the nature of the medium; most posts are throwaways. We’re thinking out loud, here, and that’s okay.
So, this is me giving myself permission to stop obsessing over topic, quality, and the rest, and just iterate. Maybe I’ll come up with something interesting. Or, probably, not. That’s ok.
