Drawing selfies is not my favorite thing to do. They are difficult. Not only because they are faces with many mountains and valleys, but there is also hair. Do I care if it’s a good or bad drawing? No. It’s just a drawing. It might look like me, it might not.
I’ve taken on my friend Lulu Stanley’s rule of thumb for starting a new sketchbook: skip a few pages in and draw a self-portrait. It breaks the ice, so to say. It doesn’t glare at you from the first page. It’s probably the most difficult drawing or doodle or thing that you will mark a page with (ie: write) in the entire sketchbook, so it’s all downhill from the first page.
My last sketchbook was stolen. I had been working on it for years. It was full of line drawings of still lifes from my daily life. I bought this new sketchbook a week or so ago and decided to just doodle. Every night when I wind down from working on the web sites, I sit and make at least three pages of doodles. It de-stresses me. I don’t care what they look like.
My work in general is very abstract or conceptual. Self-portraits, or drawing “things” puts me in an entirely different headspace. It keeps me practicing. If I’m going to fill a sketchbook entirely with doodles, then I try to draw a tree every now and then.