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Draw and Sketch with a Pen to Force Iteration and Find Fun Possibilities
A few years back, I started using a pen to draw in my sketchbook. It is not that I don’t like drawing with a pencil. I still draw with a pencil from time to time. Drawing with a pen forced me to not be attached to the outcome. If one sketch/drawing did not work, I would try again.
“So, if you have an idea, you must follow your line of thought to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not. You must explore, without necessarily knowing where you’re going.” — John Cleese
Along the way, unexpected accidents would happen. Maybe the whole sketch didn’t work but there was a particular feature of the character that was good. On the next try, I would keep the element that worked on the last attempt and see how it might look on a slightly different character design. As a result, interesting combinations would organically happen that would not have occurred if I had tried to perfect just one idea.
When I started trying to sketch an illustration of the actor John Cleese, I went through several variations. Originally, I was attached to the idea of him wearing a bowler hat like I had seen him wear in old…
