I’ve started drawing. On my recent work trip to Germany, my team lead told us she did a random thing in the airport that she would have never expected to do. She needed a new nib for one of the fountain pens she uses for drawing. When she was in the Berlin airport, one of the airport convenience stores had a whole display of LAMY fountain pens. That in itself was pretty unusual — have you ever been to an airport convenience store that sells fountain pens? She was delighted! LAMY is the pen type she needed a nib for. And at this airport convenience store in Berlin, not only did they sell the pens, they also sold nibs. So while she waited for her flight, my lead was able to complete the task of purchasing and changing her pen’s nib.

I have a LAMY fountain pen. I wanted to see a LAMY fountain pen display in an airport. But more than that, I was intrigued by the thought of using my LAMY pen for drawing. This isn’t the first time this has occurred to me (see My friends are all drawing from October 2020). Back then, though, I got discouraged pretty quickly. My focus was on a finished product: I expected a drawing that looked like the thing I was drawing. When that didn’t happen, I stopped drawing.

On our trips to Palma and Munich, my team lead would take time every day to draw or paint. She had a sketchpad that I immediately coveted. It’s small and flips open like a journalist’s notepad: you lift the cover up instead of to the left. It’s the perfect size for traveling or keeping in a purse so that you have it with you at all times. We talked a lot about her drawing and painting practice, how soothing and meditative it is for her. She continually used her phone to snap photos of things she wanted to paint or sketch: tangerines on a tree, a cocktail glass, teammates. The more we talked, and the more I saw her seeing things she wanted to draw, the more I itched to try it again. Not for the finished drawings, but for the process.

When we went to Munich, she wanted to go to an art supply store, so my teammates and I tagged along. I was toying with the idea of buying myself a pocket-sized sketchpad like hers. And maybe a couple of drawing pens.

At the shop, I found a German-made sketchbook exactly like I wanted: small and unintimidating. I also picked up three Sakura pigma micron fineliners. I wanted something different from my fountain pens. The shopkeeper bagged my tiny purchases in a plastic bag for me to protect them from the rain.

When we emerged from the shop, I was excited. On our meetup in Palma, our team lead led us in an exercise to do blind contour drawings of one another: we spent one minute looking at a teammate and drawing them without looking at the paper and without lifting our pens from the paper. The results were hilarious and fun and forced us to reject perfectionism. This exercise opened the door for me to not take drawing so seriously. I laughed and signed the portrait I made of my teammate as if it were a work of genius.

As we walked down the sidewalk away from the shop, my lead was excited for me. She talked about how how much fun it is to be fearless in drawing, to not worry about what it looks like, but to just do it for the hell of it, because the process is fun, or meditative, or whatever good feeling it gives. It got me to thinking about writing, and how much writers block ourselves by self-editing before we even write a word on the page. The joy in writing for me is not getting it perfect: the joy is in letting words spill out. Maybe I’ll fix them up, maybe I won’t, but I enjoy just letting the words flow.

As soon as I got back to my hotel room, I sat down and drew. I drew the Glockenspiel. The next day, I drew my coffee cup and cakes from the cake shop. The third day I drew a Munich surfer, the fourth a swan on the lake I walked every morning, the fifth a leaf with raindrops on it. On the 10 hour flight home, I picked up doodling, and I spent hours just drawing lines and shapes. The plane was frigid as we flew over the Atlantic, so I plugged in the headphones and turned on the crackling fireplace relaxation video they had on the in-flight entertainment. I’d read for a little while, then pull out my sketchpad and doodle to the snap and pop of a video fire, then read some more.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve drawn every day as well: a ginkgo leaf I saw by our son’s car, the apple pie from Thanksgiving. With each drawing I do, I find a technique I want to learn. I want to learn how to do textures, I want to learn how to shade. Sometimes I find myself wishing my drawings were better, and I have to remind myself that perfection is not the point. Aiming for perfection makes it feel more like work than play, and it’s no fun anymore. But when I draw just because I like the feeling of the pen on the paper, and when I try to improve one little thing at a time — like texture, like shading — I feel invigorated, and I love it.

P.S. I did see a LAMY fountain pen display in the Munich airport! Fountain pens in the airport, home of Leuchtturm paper… Germany is my kind of place.

P.P.S. I approach my blog posts these days like I approach drawing: they’re messy, and don’t necessarily make sense, and they’re far from perfect. When I aim for something clean and tidy and meaningful, something “well-written”, I end up not blogging. And I’d rather blog than not, so here we are.