Yesterday I began searching Double Take for the best story to end this three-month series of essays. Here it is— it’s about Endings and Beginnings, and is also a gentle challenge to you and to me.

Are you facing something at this very moment that feels like an unwelcome ending?

After a reasonable amount of angst and perhaps even some tears, can you shift your viewpoint just a bit, to the left or right, so a tiny sparkle might glint through a crevice in your current story?

A deep breath and a cuppa might be in order too.

Four years ago, I had good reason to believe I was losing the rest of my limited eyesight, so I wrote a book to encourage people to appreciate their own eyesight. I invited them to “discover the joy of seeing by sketching.” In that book, I intentionally kept my vision struggles a secret because the book was about you, the reader, not me.

Two years later, in September 2022, I decided to write another book (Double Take) which would reveal the fact that the author of the art-instruction bestseller, Look at That!, had already lost much of her eyesight. If I worked hard, I knew it could be inspiring instead of creepy. It became an illustrated artist’s memoir, chock full of images (155 illustrations) and stories of life as a compulsive watercolor sketcher. I was eager to tell people what had kept me sketching, filling dozens of sketchbooks just for me, not to create art exhibits, sell framed work, or make a commercial art business out of it.

So “why sketch”?  The short answer: Because plein air sketching can be an instant vacation from a busy brain, an inexpensive hobby, no sign-up or reservations needed!

Today’s excerpt is from those last few months before I published Look at That. It is the story of how one day I was minding my own business, hanging out with friends, when suddenly a glimmer came to me. A tiny glimmer.

“Hmm, I could organize a little booklet, have a dozen copies made at Staples, and give them to anyone interested. Yeah, that sounds easy.” No big deal, right? Nothing scary here.

Five months later, I had completed an in-depth course in self-publishing, had written and illustrated an actual book, and published it for distribution in bookstores and on Amazon. It was a ton of fast-track excruciating and exhilarating learning.

All because in one moment, I thought I had a tiny nugget of encouragement that might be worth sharing with others. Then I took the next baby steps. Simple.

You have a nugget too, of course, even if you don’t know it yet.

In truth, we are all just walking baskets of gold-nuggets just waiting for an insight. Listen to your heart – she whispers.

~~~~~

June 26, 2020— journal entry

I’m in Week 2 of Summer School in my creative circle group. The focus now is very gentle brainstorming. No plan-making yet, just pondering the questions in this week’s lesson.

“What am I leaning toward for my next creative impulses?”

“What is drawing me?”

“What do I want to be?”

“What do I want to do?” (That’s an entirely different question!)

“What do I want to finish by a year from now?”

My immediate answer, which felt like a pipe dream, was:

“By a year from now, I want to have created a little booklet, very simple, based on my Kimball Jenkins School of Art lesson plans. Maybe call it “The Look at That Sketcher’s Manual.” Dead simple.”

Wow, where did that come from! Now that I put into writing what felt like a crazy idea, I’m already scribbling out the table of contents. I can’t write fast enough…

July 2, 2020 journal entry – early morning quiet excitement about making a booklet

I feel like I’m being both drawn and nudged to do this tiny book project. What a energy difference I felt when I shifted my focus from writing a memoir about childhood trauma to creating an easy-to-follow sketching manual.

This booklet idea started when I realized I had worked so hard fine-tuning those art class lesson plans, and if I’m never going to teach again, those lessons are all going to die on my laptop. And the way my eyesight is going, I may not have that long to see my laptop screen either!

The reason I started teaching in the first place, only three years ago, was clear:

There simply were no in-person classes, nor any instruction books, whose primary goal was to streamline the journey from nervous beginner to playful, easy sketcher.

The online courses from Sketchbook Skool were as close as I could get to what I was looking for, but I wanted more. I wanted to create a local community. I wanted to offer an in-person class with minimal technique and maximum enticement. Joyful enticement, not excruciating efforts!

Now the challenge is to transfer my gesture-filled in-person presentation into a booklet. Pithy little sentences are coming to me out of nowhere, crazy things like:

“The subject matter doesn’t matter! You’re learning to see, that’s all!”

“Look! Look again! Start tracing what you see into your sketchbook with big juicy lines!”

I ask myself, what do I want to say more than anything?

What is this book’s North Star?

I want the reader to know in their bones,

“There’s no left-brain, linear secret to getting good at sketching. You’re learning how to get good at sitting around doing nothing. You’ve done that before, right?

“The hardest part is giving your adult brain permission to calm down.

“Then look around.

“Then take a breath, then put the tip of your pen on the paper.

“Then look, breathe again, and simply caress the world.”

But will they believe me? Unlikely.

Later that day…

I’ve made the rock-solid decision to leave my personal eyesight situation completely out of this “Look at That!” book.

It’s obvious to me; the more art instruction I write, the more important I know it is. The entire focus of Look at That needs to be on the excitement of seeing, that’s all.

It was so aggravating to teach at Kimball Jenkins in March 2019 when my eyesight challenges distracted everyone, not just me, from the momentum of the art class. Now my enthusiasm can fly; my difficulty seeing is irrelevant. It’s so empowering to present myself as an artist, an art teacher, with no red flag of disability obscuring the message. That may come out in a future book, but certainly not now.

I know writing this book, then getting it all the way through editing and designing, and across the finish line to publishing, will be a process with a million forks in the road. I know I’ll be tempted to throw the whole thing in the trash more than once, especially if I listen to that old internal voice saying, “Who do you think you are?” That voice is vintage self-doubt.

I’ve decided to have no deadline, no schedule at all, to just work on the next tiny bit, as far as my very near-sighted single eye can see (metaphors come in so handy!). I need some pleasurable momentum before I make any formal plans. In the past, long-range planning often killed my joy. Now I need to trick myself daily into thinking this new project is, “No Big Deal.” Then I might actually complete it when I’m not looking!

I’m so grateful for the understanding from Syd Banks I came across in 2008. It taught me that every single minute of the day, I have the innate ability to observe my own thoughts and ask whether they’re serving me well at this very moment or not. “Don’t believe everything you think” is the best advice I ever heard.

I bet a couple dozen pages printed at Staples will be more than enough for this booklet called Look at That!

We’ll see.

(A couple years later, the little book had sold 12,000 copies worldwide instead of 12. Ya never know…)

~~~~~

I hope you have enjoyed this essay series. Feel free to forward any of them to friends and family members who might enjoy them.

Public comments can be posted below.

Private questions or comments will reach me by using the Contact link here.

All three of my books are available on Amazon in eBook and paperback formats.

The newest book, Look at That! – Second Edition, is also available as a beautiful hardcover.

A big thank you to the recent donors to the Tip Jar on this blog. If you find these posts valuable, I hope you will contribute to The Tip Jar. It is my preferred alternative to having this be a subscription website. The Tip Jar is a secure site, and it helps keep this website solvent.
 As always, thanks for spending some time with me “aloft.” Happy sketching!