I’m always afraid to drag my pencil across a blank sheet of paper making the first mark. To me every sheet is a pristine canvas for me to translate the perfect visualization of what’s in my head to paper. In my mind if it doesn’t have perfectly drawn figures, cool fonts, and grand concepts than I would rather not put anything in it at all.

When I was younger I would always come home and sit at the kitchen table to draw. The TV was always on in the background burning wonderful 80′s films into my memory. Every night I would grab a perfectly stark and unblemished piece of white paper and hover over it with the “perfect” Bic mechanical pencil. I would spend minutes and sometimes the whole night with hesitation on making the first mark. Sometimes I would start drawing and immediately crumple up the sheet in disgust. Other times I would draw relatively the exact same character or idea over and over again in attempts to get it right. I eventually got to the point where i despised sketching because I was never happy with anything that found it’s way from pencil to paper.

Recently, I have forced myself to draw and sketch more. I’ve been told it for years, but continuing to draw, design, photograph, or whatever only makes you better. I’m breaking out of the tension of doing that. I’m doing my best to not jump right into rendering something without really exploring all the options first. It’s become fairly therapeutic and a mechanism for me to not forget good ideas. Ironically, I wish I had more time for it, like the hours I would spend as a kid agonizing over making the first mark.