Keeping Your Tools Sharp

Some of the best creative advice I’ve received.

Welcome to my Pelkern Comics newsletter! If you are new here, I create fantasy comics about adventures in a subterranean planet called Pelkern. I send these newsletters about my comics and creative process every other month.

My mom is an artist with a BFA in Printmaking, and she’s one of the best artists I know. But when my mom was raising young kids, she didn’t have much opportunity to make art. When she did find the rare opportunity, she found she didn’t have direction, was rusty at the techniques, and didn’t quite know what to do. This was frustrating.

She told this to a friend, a writer named Ruth, who was a few stages further on in life. Ruth gave my mom the advice she had received from her father. Ruth’s dad said, “you should always keep your tools sharp, even when you don’t have much opportunity to use them.” Ruth told my mom to do small things to keep developing her artistic skills, so that when she had the opportunity or direction on where to go, she was ready.

I have found the idea of “keeping your tools sharp” helpful. While I don’t have kids, I have had times when other responsibilities or life events have overrun my opportunities to make comics. And even in the cycle of comic-making, there are times when I am writing and not drawing. So, I do small things to keep my drawing abilities from getting rusty.

For the last two years I’ve drawn 15 minute warm-up sketches on most weekdays. Usually I draw five sketches, three minutes each. The results aren’t finished, gallery-ready art. Sometimes the drawings are even hard to decipher. But it keeps my eye to hand coordination fresh and maintains my momentum during seasons when I don’t draw very much.

One thing I have learned from the process, though, is that the less decisions I have to make each time, the more feasible it is to maintain. At first I found myself spending an extra 10-15 minutes just figuring out what I should draw, making it a half hour session rather than a 15 minute one. I solved this issue by picking one subject—humans—and getting some subscriptions to photo libraries.

Here is an example of a day’s warm-up sketches from February:

(These are drawn from Scott Eaton’s “Bodies in Motion” library–I have the professional subscription).

There are lots of different ways to maintain your skills, however. Do you have any methods you use to keep your tools sharp for your undertakings? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you for reading. See you in June!

–Bethany Sanders