Daily Sketches

I started working for another architect this week. While I was there my first day, I was talking to the architect who is currently supervising me and getting me used to the company. Our conversations were fairly standard for someone in the architecture field, things like complaints about plan checks (especially when cities don’t do internal reviews), other projects we’ve worked on, our experience with drawings and renderings. I also mentioned that I appreciate the drafting tables in the office. I don’t think too many offices still have physical drafting boards, so it was kind of nice to see.

I have never worked in an office with hand drafting, but I learned it in school. My first 2 semesters in architecture were almost exclusively by hand. Then I went into doing more in Revit (and Rhino, unfortunately). I still would start my projects by hand though. I would grab some sketch paper and a mechanical pencil and do my initial sketches by hand. There is something that helps you think through a project and it’s appearance when you have pencil to paper. It used to be an important part of my design process. I sometimes still do that, but not nearly as much.

I was told the people in the office all do some sketching or drawing by hand. The architect I was working with specifically said he does sketches daily. This is something I have tried to get into, but I haven’t been very successful at. I got a small pad I really like specifically for daily sketches, but have only done it a handful of times. Daily sketches are kind of like when I used to write, there isn’t necessarily a goal other than to do it everyday. Some days you are developing ideas and putting them to paper, other days you are drawing lines and squiggles and just going through the motion. Both have benefits. It is something I need to try again to get into. There is a youtuber, CGPGrey, who, in a podcast, was talking about getting healthy. His thought was get into habits and work on it, but at some point you will fail or eat something super unhealthy or get lazy, like on vacation. The measure of success isn’t if you got into the habits and are able to be healthier for a bit, the real challenge comes from after the failures, your ability to get back into it. That’s part of the learning process and that’s where you really learn and improve yourself. The same is true of any beneficial habit, including sketching for me. So I just need to try again, and learn from why I failed previously.

Some of my previous daily sketches.