San Check

roll for sanity, check reality

I’ve been knocking the rust off my physical drawing skills all this month for a reason - in September I’ll be doing the illustrations for a children’s book. It will be all digital, of course, I am not putting myself through the work involved to move art from paper to page ever again! It had been a while since I had worked in line art, and I found that I was missing the mental exercise of drawing daily. For the seven years I drew every day - quality varied wildly, from simple doodles to long days for a single illustration - I referred to it as my san check. Those were the years of getting my degree, working almost full-time while doing so, and then starting a career as a scientist. I thought I had finally gotten settled and didn’t need the art. I thought I could manage my time better in other ways. I stopped making art every day.

Well, friends, I was wrong. Hardly the first time, certainly not the last. I need the mental space that drawing gives me. Not everyone does. For a while, when I was able to get outside and walk almost daily, that was fulfilling the same breathing space for my brain as well as body. Here in Texas that’s not possible - too darn hot, for one, no places to safely walk on public land accessible to my home, for another - so I’m stuck inside all summer. The garden helps. The art, I’ve rediscovered, helps more.

Sketched in Krita using the pen monitor as I set up the new computer, finished in Procreate during the Thursday livestream where I draw while we all chat.

Not everyone wants or needs to make art every day. However, you might find that you do need that san check. If you aren’t sure what that is, it’s from D&D, where the character is questioning the reality before them in their role play, so they roll to check their sanity. Oddly enough, I picked this concept up despite having played a sum total of 6 hours of rpg in two sessions at two different conventions separated by years. I’m fascinated by the concept of role-playing games, and their evident benefit to building stories, but I simply don’t have time. I do, however, have a husband who played from the first edition through forty years of his life, who explained the san check to me when we were talking about the art at one point. He was gently trying to make sure that I wasn’t doing my usual thing of trying to take on too many projects (to the detriment of my mental and physical health) and I was trying to put into words what the moments of focus and calm gave me on a given chaotic day.

It is likely akin to meditation. I can’t simply sit down and clear my head of all thoughts. Not possible for me - I know people can, I’m not one of them. I can pray, and do, but that’s a long on-going conversation, not a silence inside my skull. Art is a hyperfocus of that thoughtflow. Since I can channel it - I used to illustrate lectures, sermons, whatever I needed to focus on - it most definitely has inputs. It is not a closed circuit. Even when I’d draw without references, there are still influences from what I’m thinking about or have been concentrating on. However, it’s a step back from directly thinking. Like getting into the flow-state while writing, it’s more serving as a channel, with open ends from something, to the ink on paper (or graphite, but my first love was ink).

Doodled to test my leaking fountain pen during the Library Writer’s Group. Pen is fine, was likely overheated by having left it in the car.

I’ve known people who did this with knitting, mechanical tinkering, gardening, kneading bread dough: there are likely as many ways to find your san check as there are people. I do encourage you to think about yours, because being aware of what helps you will get you through tough days where the brain doesn’t want to ease up and give you a moment to breathe. With my art, I can breathe, instead of cogitating on what needs to be done, what I might have missed doing, how that conversation years ago should have gone… I can regain my mental equilibrium for a few moments. I come out of the deliberate daily drawing time relaxed, alert, and ready to step back into the whirlwind of life. You needn’t take long. Some days I can manage five minutes. Others, I indulge in an hour, an outrageous amount of time with my schedule. Still others, I do the art while doing other things (see above doodling through lectures).

Three days of drawing on one sketchbook page. The goldfinch, at bottom, was done using a micron pen which does make it look different. The others were done with a brush pen.

Find your peace, and then practice it. Be firm with yourself about the daily exercise. You’ll find that it will get easier, and you’ll improve your skills, as time goes on, even if you can’t spare the mental space to follow tutorials on most days. The sheer muscle memory of doing the thing, whatever the thing is, will make you better. Keep travel and such in mind when choosing your daily san check - I can easily draw on a scrap of paper with any mark-making thing. I could not bake every day as we’d all be enormous, and when on vacation I’d be missing days of my exercise. Don’t make it passive - just reading a book, or listening to music, lacks the physical component I think is important to this being a way to step outside the mental space and integrate body and soul. If you do read, or listen, pair it with writing down passages, putting a daily verse on an image, singing, recitation, some physical effort alongside the mental. No one need ever see or hear this, by the way.

Although I personally find the accountability of posting my daily efforts - for better or worse - to be helpful in keeping me on track. A friend and fellow daily-creator, Shira Tomboulian, composes every day, and puts her work up on Youtube and elsewhere. Her work is inspiring. I tell my audience while posting doodles that I encourage them to be bad, in order to get better, and I’m a living exemplar of that. If I can do it, they can do it.

First and foremost, though, this is for you. A tiny oasis of calm in the day’s activities. A moment to check in on your disordered thoughts, cut through them, and channel peace into something that gives you joy. I think you’ll find yourself the better for the exercise.

Cat tax!

Toast, inna box! Also, being chatty as I wasn’t giving her all my attention.