Sketching is the begining of all artistic endeavour just after doodling. As doodling is just runnig your pen or pencil over paper making tracks randomly, it cannot be considered sketching as yet untill you decide to put some thoughts into your tracking. Once a thought or an idea has entered your doodling is not more doodling it is creating, it has taken the step towards sketching.

I have emphasized numerous times in my writing in the past that the act of sketchig is one of the strongest form of meditation there is in practice, its just that most who sketch are not aware of it and thats even better.

Sketching makes you or force you to stop and smell the roses or the stench in the gutter beside where you sit to capture the 'Twin Toweres', (which i have never doen yet ironically, living here in Malaysia).

When you have the confidence to sit in the public anywhere and do a sketch heedless of all that is happening around you, you got the attention of your environment as it got you. You become a part of it as it becomes a part of you, the heat the noise the ugliness the unique and the mundane, they all are your expression, your creation, your sketch. You do not miss s crew out of place nor a whisper of how bad sketch is, nor do you miss the sense of being that most of common man has seem to loose while walking in the street or sitting in the mosques, thats what makes you an artist.

In sketching you capture the world in all its beauty and randomness, its commonality and chaos much more so than taking a picture with a Minolta or a Cannon. Your mind explores each and every millimeter of your subject in one glance and it is captured in your subconcious negative mind and the rest is redering the postive image through your hands and pens, and pencils and erasers (never like them) on to the pages of your journals/sketchbooks. What is so hard about that?