- Last time in our series about daily rituals
for working from home.
I learned to make a lavender latte as a way
to jumpstart my mornings but sometimes I still find it hard
to stay motivated throughout the workday
and into the evening.
I tend to go from laptop screens to phone screen
as a way to take a break but lately
that's been leaving me feeling really drained
and unproductive.
Luckily my boss, a person who would love for me
to be more productive works from home year round.
His favorite daily ritual is sketch booking.
Now I love to draw but he says it's an incredible way
for absolutely anybody to take a break in a healthy
and creative way and you know,
we could all use a break these days.
(dramatic music playing)
- [Michael] I always look for a daily ritual
that I can do that lets me focus on something
that's not a screen, something that's tactile.
Keeping a sketchbook for me is that thing.
Sketching is one of those things that seems really hard.
It seems like you have to build up this huge amount of skill
and practice and be, you know, an artist.
But if you take a different approach
which is just super casual and just enjoying the process
of just making marks on a page.
It's really liberating and it makes it way less intimidating
to start a sketchbook.
- The good break from managing me
and all the videos that we're making.
- Exactly.
- (laughing)
(dramatic music playing)
- I'm kind of an art supply freak.
I like to invest in tools that feel kind of special to me.
I have maybe five or six active sketchbooks.
I like to have something large and something small
so I can have something that I can put in my pocket
and take with me when I'm going downstairs to lunch
or if I'm taking a walk outside.
As a beginner I think it's great to have something
on the large side because
when you have a little tiny notebook,
you tend to really dote on the details
and when you're starting out sketching,
you don't wanna worry about the details,
you wanna work loose and fast and quick.
So for my little sketchbooks, these are little mold, skin,
flexible kinda pocket size.
They're blank page
and they feel kind of a little bit premium.
Pretty much anything you can get at Muji
but they're all really cheap and really minimal.
This is like a pocket one.
They tend to be actually fairly high quality
for how cheap they are.
But if you have five or 10 of these lying around,
you can just fly through them and not worry about
what you're putting on the page whether it's good
but if you wanna level up a bit,
my all around pick would be a Stillman & Birn sketchbook.
This is the Stillman & Birn Epsilon series.
It's got sort of semi thick paper
that will handle pretty much any medium you wanna
throw at it.
They have a really durable stone binding
so you can lay them really flat and sketch across the page,
which is really fun to do.
A look turn 19 or 18 or 1917 or whatever
and it's like very pliable and durable
and with really thin paper.
- Did you monogram that yourself?
- Yeah, it's just like a little paint marker.
I have a tonne of favorite pens and pencils.
It's really helpful to get something
that is bold and smooth.
Something again that you can be a little free with
and loose and gestural.
So one of my favorite kinds of pens
of these Faber-Castell Pitt pens.
They're basically felt tick markers
and they have these brush tips and they're really great
if you have a larger notebook.
They're good quality.
They're archival and waterproof
and they're gonna last forever
and they just give you this really nice bold stroke.
You could just do really quick studies basically
with this pen.
I probably did these standing
on the road in like 30 seconds.
This is also a brush pen.
It's called the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen.
It's an actual bristle brush tip pen
that's loaded with an ink cartridge.
- And it's like refillable ink cartridge.
- Refillable you can buy new cartridges
if it runs out.
Just really bold strokes.
This is just like a two second sketch
of a coffee mug with coffee.
Do you want to spend a little bit more money
and get something really special
that you're really gonna wanna use?
I would call it a beginner fountain pen
but it's a total workforce.
Like professionals use this pen.
Everyone loves the Lamy Safari,
which is what this is called.
The fountains are great because you can choose
what ink you wanna put in.
You can choose a color and they just have
that expressive field.
There's just so much smoother than a ballpoint pen.
You can get a little bit of line variation.
So it's just the variety that makes it fun
and the feel is really just something unique.
(dramatic music playing)
For me the most important thing
is keeping it low pressure and low lift.
One thing I love to do
is just fill an entire page with marks.
I just started drawing squares and I filled the whole page
with squares, over half a page
with these curvy lines (chuckles)
and then I just started doing these weird little squiggles
and just kept going.
It gives you kind of a goal, which is to fill a page.
There's no accuracy you need to worry about.
These are like pages I filled up with the brush pen.
- Honestly I feel like I've seen that framed
in people's apartments before.
- (chuckles) You know.
It's like I just made a work of modern art.
- Yeah.
(both mumble)
- But another thing that I really like to do
that's really easy and low lift and gets you
out of the zone of making something beautiful
is doing a blind contour drawing.
And really what it's about is choosing an object
and looking at the object and not looking at your paper
and following the line that your eye sees with your pen.
Not worrying about accuracy.
Not worrying about looking at your page and you end up
with these like semi-abstract really unique forms,
but it has this weird beauty to it that I love.
The things that I like about keeping a sketchbook,
it's really easy.
Obviously if you have a notebook or sketchbook
and a pen sitting at your desk,
you can just pick it up at any time you end up
with a product that you can be proud of,
that you can look back on and use to comes.
It forces your mind to clear the clutter
of whatever's going on with work.
Whatever is overwhelming you about the world.
You just focus down at one really simple task
that happens to be something tactile and physical
which is just a nice added touch that you don't often get.
Someone's trying to open my door and I think it's a child.
Give me a second.
I literally think my daughter was asking me
how to do virtual backgrounds on zoom.
(both chuckle)
- Like how do you do the background thing?
- Should send her a link from our video.
- (laughing) I know.
Go to our YouTube channel, hello.
- She's not subscribed to her own nephew's youtube.
- I'm terrified of introducing her to YouTube.
- (laughing)