My schedule got completely messed up last month.
While I was in Bali, I realized I hadn’t scanned all the drawings I wanted to post beforehand. Then the trip itself became a distraction. I was enjoying it and was sketching a lot. But when I returned, that quiet guilt came back too — why am I still not posting?

And you know how it goes — once you miss one deadline, missing the next becomes easier, and suddenly you’re three weeks behind. But what matters most is that you get back up, pick up where you left off, and keep going.
So here it is — the very late August Sketchbook. I didn’t want to skip this one.

The start of a new series

This is the first post in my new Sketchbook series. It actually began after I read “Remains of the Journey” by Jörg Asselborn — a book that inspired me to create a sketchbook section on my blog. It felt like a natural addition to everything I write about, and also a good way to stay motivated.

Having a reason to sketch regularly turned out to be a great push. My goal is to build a kind of visual diary — something I can look back on later to see not only how and if my skills improved, but also how my interests and style evolved over time.

Sketching and progress

I think that sketching is such a beautiful habit.
Even though I don’t manage to draw every single day yet, I try to stay consistent. Some days are great — my hand flows, lines fall into place, and I can feel the progress. Other days, it feels like my hand doesn’t belong to me. The lines are stiff, everything looks wrong, and frustration builds up.

But the most frustrating part is that progress is not linear. It’s always a few steps forward, a few steps back. Sometimes it feels like I’m never gonna reach that level where drawing feels completely effortless. But I’m starting to think maybe it never really does.
Drawing always takes effort. Even when your hand starts listening to you. And maybe that’s the point — it isn’t supposed to become effortless, just more fluent.

Sketchbook pages

I didn’t feel like drawing that day, so I started with a small frame in the upper corner, planning to do only that. By the time I finished it, I was in the zone. I kept adding small frames, filling them with fruits and veggies. It turned into one of my favorite pages.

When I was selling my Fuji camera, I took a photo of it from above. Later, it seemed like a fun challenge to draw, especially all the tiny knobs and dials. Very meditative.

I always hesitate to draw in public, but I still bring my sketchbook just in case. This belongs to the rare 5% of times I actually took it out. I was sitting in a coffee shop, looking at a beautiful old building, and I just wanted to draw it. The place was quiet, no one sitting behind me — which helped.
When I got home, I experimented by adding colored pencils. I liked the result.
That floating ellipse was a failed attempt to draw a coffee cup. Totally missed the angle. Now it’s part of the composition forever!

Total blunder. This is what I meant when I said that sometimes it feels like you are going backwards instead of forward. I felt like I was progressing and then this happened.
I was walking through the cemetery (Swedish cemeteries are peaceful, more like parks), and I saw this tombstone, took a photo, and drew it later. The perspective went completely wrong (maybe because of the skewed photo angle).
I guess that’s why they say it’s always better to draw from life than from a photo.

I continued experimenting with colored pencils.

And then I went back to black and white.
I wanted to show light rays falling across the floor — hatched for shadow, white for light — but it didn’t quite turn out as I imagined. Classic case of “looked better in my head.”

I almost always draw things exactly as I see them, so I wanted to challenge myself to invent something instead. I saw a street lamp and thought — How can I make this lamp different? What if instead of light, it was growing plants?
Not a groundbreaking concept, but a small step towards creating from imagination rather than just observation.

Sketched this on the train to Copenhagen. Tried capturing the train interior in a very Paul Heaston style. Not easy to draw on a moving train!

At this point I was losing motivation, so I copied an image from Pinterest, just for the sake of keeping up the habit. It was a low effort sketch. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel much about this one.

I took Mattias Adolfsson’s Domestika course. He is a Swedish artist that is just amazing. I always find his drawings to be full of life and very interesting. He was talking about “oblique projection” technique that he uses often. It’s essentially drawing straight-on facades, then adding angled depth. So, I decided to practice it by drawing silly houses.
Simple idea, but the results are surprisingly dynamic.

These were daily practice sketches from Peter Han’s Dynamic Bible book. This is just a small selection that shows types of exercises I did.

Final thoughts

This was my August in sketches — a mix of exercises, urban sketching, doodles, calmness, and frustrations.

Going through these pages now, I can already see some patterns — what I enjoy, what challenges me, and where I tend to get stuck. I hope to look back at this one day and see how far I’ve come.