The advantage and disadvantage of drawing less perfect.

My experiment yesterday to draw while tired taught me an important lesson: Either the lines are perfect or the overall picture is perfect. Never both of them.

In trying to get every line perfect you invest a lot of time and effort. So much so that you will never say something like “OK, now I know what I want, lets start over”.
You can’t after investing all that energy.

I’ve started my drawing again and very soon found why I’ve never tried this before.
There is something very frightening about drawing and going for imperfection intensifies that fear. Even if you have a photographic memory and a visual thinking process, like I have, you don’t exactly know what you are going to draw until you’ve finished your drawing.
You never know whether you’ve drawn something you like until you’ve finished the drawing.
Going for imperfection feels as though you’re setting yourself up to fail.
And it’s quite possible that you are going to fail.

Actually it’s almost certain that you’re going to fail since this is only a sketch.
If you find that you like what you’ve drawn you will have to start over to make it a genuine drawing.

As scary as this way of drawing is, in this case it’s also more educational then trying to get every every line just right.
This time I started out with a kind of framework by drawing a line of squares from the down left corner to the upper right corner. The idea is that the steps in the upper right corner are higher.
Which is fine but in drawing the rest of the steps I find that they don’t exactly fit. I have to figure the logic of the drawing out the make it fit.
Since the point of this drawing is to learn to understand perspective it’s a good thing I have to think about it.

Stairway to haven