Drawing, Moleskines & Writing

I want to learn to draw better and draw more. I love to write and often jot things down in a moleskine - or on any scrap of paper I can find, but I'd love to draw the same way. Maybe I can do as Sacha Chua is doing and combine the two.

Books on drawing I have. I have pored through them and followed their advice. I have all the tools I need: pens and moleskine sketchbooks and colours and more. But whenever I start, I have so much inspiration, so many ideas - so many directions I could take drawing that I get bogged down.

While getting inspiration from James Gurney's blog, and one of the many 'moleskine art' pages, I ended up at a link and video of people making flip-book animations with small moleskine sketchbooks. The link was here and the video here.

It struck me that some of my problem is the same as the problem I was running into with writing. The post I wrote the other day about writing, and how the 'theme' and 'jot outline' can provide me with the structure I need, might just as easily apply to drawing.

In the flip-books, the students had to decide what the story was that they were telling, then outline the steps, before even putting a pencil to paper. Whether one drawing or a series, in order for drawing to be meaningful to me - and therefore something I'll be more likely to do, I need to have a story/theme or emotional connection to the subject. It doesn't have to be grand, just present.

Perhaps I can use that same structure to bring order to chaos in my drawing as well as my writing. By getting as much practice getting clarity about what I am doing as well as learning more about how to do it well - whether writing or drawing, maybe the habit of sketching will come as naturally to me as the habit of jotting down notes.