Sometimes, I need a little time out from whatever I'm working on. Embroidery can be quite intense at times, especially if I'm stitching a pet portrait and concerned with likeness / colour matching / flow of the embroidery and stitches etc etc so a break to do something different, to take just 5 minutes out and draw something, means I can return to the embroidery with fresh eyes and a new positivity. 'Blind line drawings' are the best for a short pause. Simply find an object / person / animal / whatever, put your pen on your page and draw what you see without looking away from your subject - never look at the page. Sometimes the drawings look childish, sometimes they resemble nothing and sometimes it's just a bunch of lines. But keep practising, keep having fun with it. It totally alters how you look at drawing subjects in the future and just sometimes, you kind of pull it off and create a portrait Picasso would be proud of and an illustration with beautiful marks that Cy Twombly would be jealous of.
Above is a blind line drawing of a rabbit skull and rabbit leg bone. It's half ok / half completely out of sinc and only took me 5 minutes, if that. Drawings like these make me want to embroider illustrations more - I'm never not thinking of my next project, no matter how many breaks I take.
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