ABSTRACT
The aim of sketching is to find a "worksite" in a collection of developing materials—to throw down some ideas, to delineate a direction of inquiry, to clarify and differentiate examples. For beginners, the main difficulty is staying on topic. Artists who want to sketch a landscape do not start by writing philosophical notes on the nature of art, on how they came to the particular scene they want to sketch, or on the relationship between what they are doing and an academic literature on drawing from nature. They are dealing with the tasks at hand: composing, sketching, and attempting to find and realize the drawing that a present scene suggests to them. Over the years, the author has been doing crossword puzzles as a pastime. His wife has a number of puzzle collections from the New York Times. The first thing he does when he start on a new puzzle is to see whether he can get any answers at all.
