I love the feeling of getting a good run on words. The feeling when you’re barely even looking at the computer as pictures fall from your brain, trickle through your fingertips, drip between the keys of your keyboard and the story appears, as if by magic, on the screen in front of you. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as feeling story in your brain and watching it appear so organically.

But sometimes the words aren’t flowing or you want a change of tack, and recently I’ve been finding myself wanting to turn my hand to drawing for some light relief, a creative diversion. There’s something therapeutic about taking pencil to paper, about spending hours on details (note to self, this is an exercise in patience practice), about shaping an image with lines rather than words. And of course, I need practice, and there’s lots of room for improvement, but I thought I’d share my efforts. Any tips from all y’all artists out there?

Because I’m used to Photoshop and having an ‘undo’ button, I ended up taking photos as I went, so here’s a peek at how it developed. Once the pencil drawing was down I suddenly realised that inking it felt like some real high stakes drama, with each line feeling like one slip-up away from disaster.

It was a fun diversion and I’m hoping to try some more drawing in the not too distant future. What are your creative diversions?