There’s nothing like documentation to keep you motivated through a project, but when it comes to my drawing-a-day practice, let’s just say you don’t need to know how the sausage got made.  In order to spare you the gory details (or the awkward sketches, as the case may be) I’m just going to post my progress on a monthly basis, highlighting some of the things I’ve tried an learned along the way.  I began the project on December 20th, 2011, so today marks the end of the first month.  Here’s a sampling.

Not knowing what to draw, I started drawing animals from memory, alphabetically.  I started with an aardvark, which was so pitiful I threw it out immediately.  Next I tried to draw a bird (a penguin, actually), which was also horrendous.  Here’s my third attempt with a monarch butterfly, but I couldn’t remember the actual pattern their wings have:

After that I gave up on animals for the time being and just decided to work with the alphabet itself. i had just finished a typography class, so it was kind of fun.  Here are a couple of typography doodles. I won’t share the hundreds of random letters I drew, though you can see some of them show through the back of the paper.

10,000 hours of expertise starts with a single sketch….

It was two days after Xmas.  Can you guess which movie I went to see?

Tired of making stuff up, I decided to try drawing some things IRL. Here’s my attempt at drawing a rubber tree leaf that looked like a bird.  It took a surprising number of tries to get the proportions and curves right, even with a ton of erasing.

And this is a two-minute sketch of the back of my husband’s head before he moved.

Then Tina Jett asked me how things were going. She is doing a drawing-a-day project too, in the form of an illustrated blog, which inspired me to illustrate my last two blog posts, too.

Anyone else embarking on a similar project? How are things going with your New Year’s resolutions?