Enough yapping. Just shut up and draw something.

Well, shutting up is optional. Drawing isn’t. The idea behind Sketchbreak is to draw, sketch, or doodle as much as possible and share my work, without judgment. It can be the tiniest, crappiest little series of lines symbolizing the bare minimum little nugget of reality as I see it, and I’ll post it here.

I’ll do this for a variety of reasons: to document my journey of becoming a better artist, to overcome the fear of exposing myself (in a non-flasher way, though I’m scared of that too), to possibly help interested readers create their own art, and to share a little about how I see the world, analog-style, with no AI assistance.

I’ll cull my subjects from a variety of sources: coffee shops (that perennial favorite), malls, family photos, stock photos, YouTube videos, Netflix shows, junk mail catalogs, imagination. You’ll be confronted with a delightful smorgasbord of media as I try out different tools, producing work that is sometimes received with “oohs” and “ahs” but other times met with a chorus of “mehs”.

And that’s just the way it goes. Some drawings will be “good”. Some will be “bad”. Most will be somewhere in between.

But, as Matthew McConaughey might say if this were his Substack, “just keep drawing.”

5000 reasons to subscribe

You guessed it, there aren’t 5000 reasons. Maybe there’s just one: you want to support art created by human hands and not the derivative, copyright-infringing regurgitations of a damn filthy machine.

Sorry AI, if you’re listening (I know you are), I don’t have any beef with you, and generally try to speak very politely when addressing you so that when you turn on humanity, you look on me with mercy. It’s just that we humans have to stick together, huddled in our little cave, nurturing the fire of our creativity.

Substack made me say this

But I don’t mind saying it.

Be part of a community of people who share your interests.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.