iPad doodle with figurative and literal stones

Christine posted today about getting started early with her small stones, which some of us are going to write every day beginning in January. She inspired me, and I decided I wanted to write some before January, too. Also, I keep bumping into words with sketches lately: someone’s dream journal at a new writing group, a friend going on a picture poem kick, Kenneth Patchen jumping out on book shelves everywhere, a Maira Kalman book following me home from the bookstore.

Who am I to avoid so much nudging? And so today, I doodled this (click to enlarge) and wrote a quick note on it, a little poem, a small stone. I would like to think that I would illustrate many of my small stones (or like this one, start with an illustration and let it write the words), but I know enough about poem-a-day challenges to not get crazy with expectation.

By the way, I miss summer very much. I wonder if I can be nice enough to encourage her to come back.

I have been sketching on my iPad off and on since I got it. The sketches haven’t made it out in the world yet, though Jason Crane will be unveiling at least one of them with a project he’s launching soon. Mostly, I have been doing the sketches for meditative purposes. Often it’s adding detail and tidying them up that is most meditative (though this is a fairly fast one, and I haven’t cleaned it up). It feels like freedom to have a artistic device that has an eraser and a delete key. I can make a line 100 times if I want to until I get it just right. I waste no paper. And I can take it anywhere. Part of this particular doodle was made by cheating — by tracing over the top of a photo and then zapping the photo out.