I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

Two things have emerged from that effort:

First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.