No. 3 1 min read
Notes on a borrowed notebook
A friend lent me her grandfather's sketchbook from 1961. It is mostly letters, and mostly wrong.
The notebook is small, bound in green cloth, and full of alphabets. Some pages hold the same capital R drawn forty times, each one a little less clumsy than the last.
What moves me is not the good letters. It is the bad ones he kept. He never tore out a page. The mistakes stayed next to the corrections, so you can watch him learning in real time.
A practice worth stealing
I have started keeping my own failed drawings in a separate folder called "almost." It is already the most useful folder on my computer. When I get stuck, I do not look at my best work. I look at the almosts, and I can see exactly where I turned around.