Quotes & Sayings About Sketching

Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin. — Michael Dirda

It is a matter mostly of having the time to spare from my finished paintings to put in on travelling and sketching out of doors. — E. J. Hughes

I appreciate both men and women. I love the female body and truly appreciate the female form. I really enjoy sketching women, especially their backs. I definitely need a man in the bedroom, however-a nice strong chest to lie on. Still, I want to explore. Never say never. — Miranda Kerr

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said No Sketching. How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching? — David Hockney

Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever. — Molly Crabapple

I was born in 1935, and as far back as I can remember, I was sketching designs. My first subject was an aircraft, which I imagined myself piloting. — Norman Foster

She set a tankard of grog before him, the moment before he became aware of his own thirst. Gray reached for it, shaking his head. A long swallow of watered-down rum added fuel to his resentment. He'd allowed himself to become so transparent to her, while she remained an enigma to him. Her talents fit no logical pattern-sketching, painting, deceit, seduction, thievery...now the ability to pound biscuit and salted meat into a fair-tasting chowder? It was enough to make him abandon all hope of ever comprehending her.
Perhaps he never would. But it was another thought that had him hurrying through his food, desperate to put some distance between them. He might never understand her, Gray realized, but he could get dangerously accustomed to this other feeling.
Being understood. — Tessa Dare

I managed to potter along tolerably well in the morning, sitting in the sun and sketching the old buildings ... but in the afternoon, sitting in the shade ... with stiff fingers and chilled bones ... the water froze in little cakes all over the picture. — Howard Pyle

It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future. — Victoria Kahler

Since the age of six I have had the habit of sketching forms of objects. Although from about fifty I have often published my pictorial works, before the seventieth year none is worthy. — Hokusai

I always begin my stories as experiments - on large yellow tablets - a mixture of writing and sketching. — Bill Peet

After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century. — Freeman Dyson

You can never do too much drawing. — Tintoretto

Sketching is the breath of art: it is the most refreshing of all the more impulsive forms of creative self-expression and, as such, it should be as free, and happy, as a song in the bath. — Mervyn Levy

I'm an unbelievable designer. I don't know how I know and just do these things. I just start sketching and then I just know the colors and I always know the forecast. I know green and purple are going to be hot. I was born to be a designer. I worked hard to be a tennis player, I don't work hard to be a designer. — Serena Williams

I would like to be known as an 'artist'. Whether that be music, acting, sketching, cooking, whatever. I'm interested in all of those things. — Mark Salling

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa — Bukusai Ashagawa

standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together. — Emily St. John Mandel

My job ranges from creating the initial overall theme of the season, to developing fabrics and sketching to sampling and fitting. — Nicole Richie

I hate leisure, except reading. I'm really a person made to work, if sketching is considered work. — Karl Lagerfeld

She was pretty, yeah, but pretty like hundreds of other girls. You," he dabbed the bread in the air as if sketching her, "you're ... memorable. Who you are just shines through your face. — Julia Spencer-Fleming

Now relax, think positively and begin
the smile of success awaits you. — Claudia Nice

While perspective is a handy device to construct imagined spaces, it is not useful, and possibly detrimental, to sketching existing environments. — Paul Laseau

There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things: — Charlotte Bronte

I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear. — Siegfried Woldhek

Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do? — Edith Schaeffer

When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality. — Jean Genet

When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I did a sketch every day of my teacher and what she wore. At the end of the year, I gave her the sketchbook. For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams. — Alber Elbaz

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear. — Vera Wang

They always told each other about the parts of the day they had spent apart, sketching in detail so the other could see it, so it became a memory they seemed to share in common. They were good at talking. Sharing stories. Everything he did only seemed to take root when he told her about it. There were times when he arrived home as breathless as an inspired poet with the urgency to talk to her. — Glenn Haybittle

Sketching on a regular basis requires you to pay close attention to the visual world around you. With practice, you begin to see things you never noticed before. — Paul Laseau

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. — G.K. Chesterton

I live opposite an amazing wood in London, and you can usually find me sitting there for hours and sketching. Sometimes the icon or symbol leads me to the face, but usually it's the other way around. — Noma Bar

The fundamental thing about sketching is that it isabout asking not telling — Bill Buxton

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious. — Fernando Pessoa

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me ... ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like ... junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs. — Ani DiFranco

One of the best places for a shy person to meet people is in a coffee shop. If you are a reader, bring a book and read it there - that gives a guy something to ask you about. Same goes for sketching, writing, or any hobby you can take with you. — Laurie Helgoe

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching. — Tony Gilroy

I never look at my watch when I'm sketching! — Karl Lagerfeld

Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home - that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We're so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I'm speaking from experience; I'm not above all this. — Tom Hodgkinson

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence. — Maurice Sendak

I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire ... When I look into a river, I feel I could spend a whole lifetime just painting that river. — Alan Lee

To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could, — John Carter Cash

Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain. — Janet Fitch

Stop sketching and start building. — Dennis Crowley

Historic American Buildings Survey - HABS for short - was one of FDR's greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. — Mary Anna Evans

He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed. — C.S. Richardson

Draw lines - draw a lot of lines — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

All this effort for a man who doesn't even care," Daisy muttered to herself, thinking dire thoughts about Matthew Swift.
Llandrindon sat a few yards away on the rim of a garden fountain, obediently holding still as she sketched his portrait. She had never been particularly talented at sketching, but she was running out of things to do with him.
"What was that?" the Scottish lord called out.
"I said you have a fine head of hair! — Lisa Kleypas

I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching. — John Katzman

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story. — Lynn Abbey

I'm born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching. — Karl Lagerfeld

Sketches are social things. They are lonely outside the company of other sketches and related reference material. They are lonely if they are discarded as soon as they are done. And they definitely are happiest when everyone in the studio working on the project has spent time with them. — Bill Buxton

Few people know that I am also an artist; I truly enjoy sketching and drawing. — Sonakshi Sinha

With pencil there is a tendency to be timid, either using very faint lines or erasing bad lines ... Line sketching tends to emphasize the structure of a drawing rather than the nuances of media.. — Paul Laseau

Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we apparitions guided mankind's tread, our planet, unseen counterpart to thine, as permanent, as ven'rable, as true. On dream's foundation matter's mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou've fashioned fashion thee. — Alan Moore

I always craft my words to the point where I think and hope they're perfect before I ever begin sketching. — Kevin Henkes

Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint. — Arshile Gorky

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.' — Molly Crabapple

I used to make all my clothes when I was in Southern Death Cult [the first incarnation of The Cult]. I still make things to wear on stage and I am involved with sketching, choosing fabric, cutting. — Ian Astbury

I lived in South America when I was growing up. I spent hours sketching. I was good at drawing, and I was obsessed with fashion, but I was also obsessed with magazines. — Nina Garcia

The trick is not to get too fanatical about getting the accent too accurate because then that becomes a mask. What I try to do is just painting and sketching some of the sounds without obliterating my own voice. — Anthony Hopkins

Forget about where you want to be and go out and build stuff. Dodgeball came from being bored at work ... things happen because you make them happen. Stop sketching, and start building. — Dennis Crowley

I love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music. — Amandla Stenberg

Making movies wasn't really an immediate thought, where I was raised. I was going to be a lawyer, and I thought I would just draw. So, I was sketching all the time and I realized that I needed some outlet, and then I found animation. — Kevin Munroe

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of a body as it turns away. — Rainer Maria Rilke

How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching. — Alain De Botton

The permanence of ink encourages one to "go for it," to try to put the line right where it should be ... continued attempts to place lines accurately build the eye-hand coordination necessary for sketching. — Paul Laseau

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections. — John Hanning Speke

Sketching is like dancing. It's process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that. — Molly Crabapple

He'd made love to her four times now, he realized, but this was his first chance to truly look upon her body. She was every inch as lovely as he'd imagined, if not more. He felt a bit guilty, realizing he'd chastised her for sketching his likeness, when he'd been conjuring an image of her nude form nightly for weeks. The only difference was, he hadn't committed his fantasies to paper.
It would take a Renaissance master to capture this beauty. — Tessa Dare

Although it is hard to visualize a landscape in a space of high dimensions, the more the number of parameters, the more likely it is that a walk of any finite distance, taken in a random direction from a place near the summit of a mountain, will go down rather than up. Thus, we may conclude that, if the hypotheses made here are true, most changes in the parameters of the laws of physics will decrease the rate at which black holes are produced in our universe. Because of this, the theory I am sketching here is actually subject to observational test. — Lee Smolin

I am most grateful for company this evening, even of the quiet variety. I am no great conversationalist, myself."
Gray snorted. Not a conversationalist. The girl had coaxed the life story out of every sailor in this ship.
She had just picked up her spoon again when Joss spoke.
"You do not find the voyage too tedious, Miss Turner?" Joss asked. "I regret that you are left to entertain yourself, being the sole passenger."
She laid down her spoon. "Thank you, Captain, but I find sufficient activity to occupy my hands and my mind. Reading, sketching, walking the deck for fresh air and healthful exertion. I'm surprisingly content, living at sea."
Gray's heart gave an odd kick. — Tessa Dare

Drawing is the only thing I've found in which I can lose myself completely. I love it. It started as something that relaxed me, but now it's a struggle because I'm pushing myself. The day-to-day sketching is fraught. — Peter Capaldi

I'll always have acting. But then if I had to choose something else it'd probably be singing or dancing - if I had to. Or maybe, like, designer, like sketching designs. — Elle Fanning

Sometimes you can incubate a character and that can take me a month just sitting on it imagining it, doing everything from sketching it to taking long walks, but sometimes you can see the character immediately. A lot of it is instinctive. — Rebecca Hall

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer. — Ma Jian

I've learned I'm rarely able to stay at home and not work. If I try to 'just sit on my couch for a little while,' I am going to grab my laptop and just knock out a few more emails, or start sketching up some product ideas for TheMuse. So when I want time off, I schedule dinners out, movie outings, and on occasion a flight lesson from Groupon. — Kathryn Minshew

Different ideas will capture my imagination and ask if they can be in a story. Sometimes they fit together and sometimes they don't. One notion leads to another and I might write pages that will have to go away later, but I'm sketching, getting to know a character, how he or she speaks or lives, so I just let it flow. Things start to click. I don't outline before starting, nor do I write one chapter at a time or even in chronological order. If I'm thinking about a scene, conversation, or event that will come later, I page down and write away. — Lisa Preston

I use a special tool. I make it myself; very sharp steel point and a handle like a pencil. For me it is a pencil. Maybe I have a special talent, a feeling you might say that lets me control it, to express my ideas as though I were sketching black on white. — Ugo Mochi

In terms of how the music developed, it was my normal process, which I would say is really a hybrid process of sketching on bits of paper, playing the piano, playing synthesisers, using the computer, staring out of the window, finding things I'd forgotten about, happy accidents, failed plans, best intentions, equipment failures. It is a multidimensional process incorporating a lot of planning and intention and a lot of randomness. Ultimately I just follow the material where it wants to go a lot of the time. — Max Richter

The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things ... — Daniel H. Pink

From the day I met her at the wedding rehearsal, I couldn't stop thinking of her beautiful face. I was forever drawing her, sketching her, and even tattooing her. How many people in Ellsberg were walking around with tattoos of Lark's face? Whenever a client didn't bring a specific image in and a woman's face was involved, I used Lark's. Hell, I hadn't even noticed this fact until two happy clients showed off their tattoos and I realized the pinup girl and fairy princess had the same face. — Bijou Hunter

The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art. — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

[While designing] I'm mixing two lines of thought really: me as a designer for women and then me as a man. At the start of the design process it's the designer for women that comes to the forefront - sketching and revising the silhouette. Then the man comes into the picture - and I look at the shoe from a very masculine point of view. Then there is a conflict between the two sides of me. Sometimes the man wins, and sometimes the designer wins. — Christian Louboutin

He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds ... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head. — Pablo Picasso

Stop sketching. Start building. — Dennis Crowley

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom. — Charlotte Bronte

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There was something different about her, though I could not say exactly what it was. It was as if she were more certain. If someone were sketching her they would use clear, strong lines, whereas before they might have used faint marks and more shading. She was like a fossil that's been cleaned and set so everyone can see what it is. — Tracy Chevalier

I would love to have my own fashion line because I love sketching. — Becky G

Sketching is a continuing source of learning rather than a string of performances. — Paul Laseau

The Sketchnote Handbook is neither about sketching nor is it about note taking. It's about receiving and processing the world in a more complete and insightful way. It's a software upgrade for your brain. For those who've been shamed into thinking that drawing is either beyond them or beneath them, this book offers a whole new way of mastering the daily onslaught of information and turning it into raw material for discovery. (For those of us who've done this all our lives, the book provides a beautifully conceived and lovingly illustrated treat, and a great gift for our left-brained friends.) — Stefan G. Bucher

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. — Hokusai Katsushika

Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good. — Cennino Cennini

A bad map is worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside these instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it. — Cormac McCarthy

The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth. — Davies Gilbert

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice - that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice - kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself?
Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much? — Ilsa J. Bick

For me, between "Reference" and "Sketching & Conceptualizing" is the "Get the Hell Out of the Studio" step. I most often NEED to shut off the computer, push myself back from my desk and escape the studio space to let possible ideas percolate in my gray matter before committing anything to paper or digital imagery as a sketch or a concept. — Jeff Fisher