Thanks to Austin Kleon, I now know that Roger Ebert kept a sketchbook for years. There’s a post about it on Ebert’s old blog and it made me want to go buy a blank notebook (and also miss his writing style):
“…everyone can draw until we are told or convince ourselves that we cannot. We start out drawing everything we see until that day comes when it is pointed out that our drawing of a dog, for example, looks nothing like a dog. Then we begin to believe we cannot draw.
[…] Begin with a proper sketch book. Draw in ink. Finish each drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish. No erasing, no ripping out a page, no covering a page with angry scribbles. What you draw is an invaluable and unique representation of how you saw at that moment in that place according to your abilities. That’s all we want. We already know what a dog really looks like.”
(Image up top is one of Ebert’s, again via Austin, with more to look at here.)