=Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post about pushing oneself for a challenge (EDiM in particular). Some really great responses and thoughts in the comment section – I encourage you to go and check it out and even add your thoughts to the discussion. Great discussion on facebook too!

As is often the case when I take the ‘pressure’ off (yesterday I was more or less admitting that I had stopped) I got a new lease of energy and have done another few sketches from the list and somehow found the motivation to scan the ones that I have already done.

Anyway, it got me thinking further.

Why did I want to do the EDiM challenge? What was the thing I wanted to get out of it? 

It was a spur of the moment idea to join in and my main motivation was to tell more people about it and to join in the fun myself – I rarely get the chance to participate in things like this. However I knew at the onset that it was going to be hard – I normally get bored with object sketching and find hard to motivate myself when it is random and not significant to me…and really I had a lot of other projects that I am working on at the moment (such as getting Foundations ready for re-offer and a new SketchingNow course).

But I think the major reason for doing it is the fact that I often find it hard to find inspiration at home – I want to play with my paints or my pens but what should be my subject? The EDiM list (and the full EveryDay Matters list started by Danny Gregory) is a great way for you to see how much there is to draw.

The BIG challenge for me is how to make a meaningful sketch on each day that records my life… but you know what I have just discovered – the fact that I sketch anything makes it meaningful and if I simply add a few notes on the side, I will have recorded my day. This morning I pulled a random sketchbook off my shelf and flicked through the pages. SO much of my life came flooding back as I turned the pages, even though what I had sketched on some days were not a perfect ‘capture’ of the day.

Ok, enough rambling for today.

So here are some of my EDiM sketches and then below are some of my other sketches in the last week or so.

They are very casual pages – I am not trying to make stunning images but just trying to keep my hand moving and that paintbrush stroking! (All sketched from life except for the panoramic scene which was from a photo.) Scanning and posting these has been a good reminder to me, that when you work in a sketchbook it is not the individual image that is important, but the narrative you are creating. It is also a reminder of why I love blogging so much as it gives me the chance to share this sequence of images with you so you see the collection rather than just a single sketch.

As you can see I do not need a challenge to sketch (every)day!

Follow up post:
Why Bother Part 2: When you don’t have the time——————-