ThatsGreat.org

After a few months of doing paper sketches and putting them up to share on facebook, flickr, etc., I realized what a valuable and motivating experience it was.  Valuable in that with every new sketch, I was learning new things, developing my technique, etc.; motivating in that I could get it out to the world (and occasionally get feedback) instantly.  Even people who wouldn’t make comments on the sites would comment on them when they saw me in person; as time went on, it felt more and more like I was drawing for an audience (which added a bit of pressure, but it was still fun).

Given that I’m often reluctant to sit down and work on songs because it can seem so onerous and ponderous (what if I screw it up?) to do on my own, I thought I’d try applying the same philosophy to playing with music.  The result is a set of what I call "song sketches," of which I’ve made nine so far (in the grid above), roughly one a day.  So far, it’s been great - I haven’t gotten as much feedback as with the sketches, but I find myself motivated to work on some music when I come home.  I think this is for several reasons - first, because these are sketches, it’s pretty low pressure - I’m not worried about making something that sounds produced and perfect.  Second, because they’re short, I know I can finish and post the new piece every night.  Third, it gives me a chance to play with different instruments and types of music than I usually do, since I’m not making complete songs.   Finally, it’s actually quite a nice way to document song ideas - there’s already a few that I want to make into more complete songs.

Hopefully I’ll keep doing this for a while - my initial goal was 30, but who knows where I’ll end up: maybe 10, maybe 100.  Stay tuned :)  You can can see the playlist of all the songsketches here.

As many of you know, I’ve been doing a lot more sketching recently, and now that I finally got a decent scanner, I’ve been getting higher quality scans of them to put up on Flickr, Facebook, etc.  For now, I’m enjoying the sharing and commenting on Facebook, but of course the photo management (multiple resolutions, view count, etc.) is much better on Flickr.

You can see the current batch of sketches on Flickr here.  Most of them are just drawn with a fine-point Sharpie in a Moleskine sketchbook (they’re the only ones with thick enough paper such that the Sharpie doesn’t bleed through).  The sketch above is from a recent Facebook project where I offered to draw sentences submitted by my friends.  The sentence for this one was from Andy, who said, “I don’t want to dodge this rain cloud.”  Heh.