Simple shapes, more fun than expected

Dear Sarah - Day 154 of our daily drawing exchange

Nikki Tate

and

Sarah Harvey

Jun 04, 2025

Feeling frustrated with myself for not being more focused about my drawing practice. I'm doing the exercises in the class I signed up for and while I can see the point of them, I want to jump ahead to actually drawing...something. I'm attaching yesterday's and today's exercises, both of which are meant to train your eye and hand. It's actually really hard to draw a line of identical squares, circles, triangles and ovals. But do I want to? Not really, but I'm persevering. My desire to "progress" with my drawing is very counterproductive.

I can blame my sore back, I suppose--pain does tend to sap the creative energy right out of you--or I can follow a tutorial which at least produced something I can call a drawing.

I need to remind myself that when we started this project, we agreed that we could call a stick figure or a doodle a drawing--and that we were not going to beat ourselves up when we had a bad day.

XO S

Hello Sarah!

No self flagellation allowed!

Ever since I saw your dots and lines the other day, I’ve been wanting to try the exercise with those cool pens I found at the thrift store (you can try them when you are here - they are nifty).

I’m not sure I followed the rules as I couldn’t remember exactly what I was supposed to do. This reminded me of the pencil and paper game we used to play as kids where we started with a grid of dots and took turns connecting adjacent dots with lines, trying to be the last one to draw a fourth line to complete a square (point!!). Winner was the one who managed to get the most squares.

Then I remembered that waaaaaaaay back at the other end of today I did the New York Times creativity challenge this morning (I was still in bed). They presented ten identical circles and using my finger on my phone as my drawing tool, I had to turn each circle into something new in less than 10 seconds per drawing.

The first couple reflect my uncoordinated use of two fingers at a time: