After a visit with my friend, Nancy Holtz, the pen sketching artist, I decided to use the pen she gave me to sketch my beagle of a certain age, Socks.

Nancy effortlessly ink sketches what she sees without drawing in pencil first. The thought of not using a pencil first brings me back to my sad memories of 3rd grade when my teacher took away my pencil. The teacher said my writing was too small and that I needed to use only a crayon until I enlarged my writing. I ought to talk to someone about this as my stomach churns at this memory.

The new pen beckoned to me. Nancy received this pen a Pentel Hybrid Technica directly from Cheap Joe when she took a class from him in North Carolina. In my book, this is like receiving a gift from the guru of art supplies.

Many of you dear blog readers know my house is filled with a pak of dogs including 2 beagles. Socks is our beagle emeritus and deserves to have his beagle poses documented for posterity. So yesterday I over came my fear of not sketching with a pencil first and sketched him with "the pen."

The first sketched resembled chicken scrawls and I wanted to quit. However, I remembered I tell everyone that drawing requires practice. I had to keep drawing. Today's sketches were better. Then I invented the beagle project; 25 Sketches in 25 Daze to keep me going.

Would you like to join me and find a subject you can sketch for 25 Daze?

Yesterday, we talked about downsizing your goals for the New Year. How's that working for you? My word "diminish" is helping me more then I expected it to. I looked at the piles of papers I need to finish filing in my studio/office and I said to myself, "I can diminish these files." Since my expectations on this filing task were set very low, I did not strive to be a filing over achiever and expect myself to get everything filed in one afternoon. So, some filing actually got done which is a miracle in my book because I would almost rather do anything else but file.

Which leads us to the drawing posted below. Its for you to print out and color. If you are one of those people who cannot find time to do art, then re read the title of this blog post and see if it motivates you to color this or something else. I am experimenting with using an alpha authoritarian voice to see if that makes people (and beagles) follow through on what I ask them. So far, the beagles are ignoring me as well as other family members...

How does diminish relate to the drawing below? Well, I didn't draw it fresh today for this blog post. I pulled it out of a file of coloring book pages I submitted to a publisher awhile ago. So, I think I diminished my drawing for the day one way or another....