Winter is for drawing. The trails are wet, the project car is under a cover, and the evenings are long enough that you need something to do with your hands that isn't scrolling.
These are the pages from November through February.
The Book
Leuchtturm1917 hardcover, dotted grid, A5. I've gone through a few of these now. The paper is good enough for ink and light watercolour washes; it's not specialist paper, but it does the job.
Pens this winter: a Lamy Safari with an EF nib (daily driver, just ink), a Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.3 for detail work, and occasional visits from a brush pen I'm still figuring out.
What I Drew
Bike parts. There's a long tradition of drawing mechanical things as a meditative exercise and there's something to it. Derailleur geometry rewards careful looking. I did about a dozen studies of different components — a jockey wheel, part of a rear dropout, a brake caliper. The goal isn't technical illustration; it's just the act of looking slowly at something you normally only interact with quickly.
Hands. Hands are famously difficult and I draw them specifically because they're difficult. Winter is good for this — enough evenings to practice without it feeling like something that should be productive.
The MGB. Started a series of detail drawings of the car while I'm still in the planning stage of the restoration. Headlight bezels. The badge. The dashboard in its current, somewhat chaotic state before I get involved with a soldering iron. I want a record of what it looked like before.
Nothing in particular. Some pages are just marks. Ink exploring paper. This is the most honest use of a sketchbook.
On Drawing Regularly
The discipline isn't about quality. Most of the pages are not good drawings. The discipline is about maintaining the habit of looking carefully at things — a skill that, like trail fitness, deteriorates without use.
I've found that a few pages a week is sustainable in a way that ambitious daily practice is not. The sketchbook doesn't have expectations.