No Day Without a Line

My Sketchbook from a college drawing class - 2006

This is the front cover of my college sketchbook during one of my drawing classes. Besides drawing from life in class, we were required to keep a separate sketchbook on our own, to turn in at the end of the course. There had to be at least 50 sketches in it, or the person's overall grade would suffer.

I had to laugh at all the students around me scrambling to fill their sketchbooks with any kind of scribble during the final week of class. Model mature student that I was, I had kept mine up-to-date, not with just random doodles, but finished pencil, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, collage and even acrylic paint drawings.

I wrote on the front cover a favorite quotation about art which has meant a great deal to me, long before I knew about Apelles of Cos, back when I was a budding artist of 5 years old. As a little child, I wanted to grow up to be an artist.  I had a grown cousin who was a professional artist, and his advice to his little cousin was "to be an artist, you have to practice drawing every day".  So writing the Latin inscription on the cover of my sketchbook was a reminder to sketch or work on finished drawings each and every day (at least while I was in this particular class).  The Latin quote from Apelles is: "Nulle dies sine linea" and it translates, "No day without a line."

"Tenacity" ink/brush (5.5x8.5 inches)

Apelles was a great Hellenistic Greek painter, said by some to be the "greatest painter of antiquity". He was court painter to Phillip ll and his son Alexander lll of Macedon during the 4th century BC. Legend says that no matter how busy his business day had been, he never let a day go by without drawing at least a line, usually an outline of some object.

Sketches and drawings are not meant to be finished works of art, although they certainly can be. They are private places to experiment with new techniques, brush up skills, and to record what we see at the moment, to take back to the studio to inspire more finished works of art. Daily use of a sketchbook soon becomes an unconscious habit, and the artist will feel naked without it.