Naked. Nude. Bare.

It's been a tough week.

I am tired in a "not just sleepy" way. I know here at She Sure is Sketchy you're used to seeing a happy artist. But sometimes I have hard days and sometimes those stretch into hard weeks. It has been a very hard week.

It has been so hard in fact, that I actually considered not attending the 22nd Annual Pratt Draw-A-Thon. I've never missed it, not once, in the last decade.

Sandra, my constant motivator, promised to come and draw with me until midnight, even though she had a crazy - early morning class at F.I.T. on Saturday. Her support was vital to arrival at Pratt. Amidst this "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" conversation I realized that my loyalty would get me in the end. I just couldn't turn my back on tradition. Pratt has had me at every Draw-A-Thon since I first arrived in New York. I felt that we owed it to one another.

I grabbed some odds and ends, graphite pencils, the new sketchbook I bought at Brooklyn Museum last week, a butcher paper sketchbook I've been wanting to try, some Tombow Markers, a little pot of watercolor paints and a waterbrush and made it out the door, feet pointed towards Clinton Hill.

In one of my favorite, dance/challenge/coming of age/New York movies, a wayward ballerina struggling with her life and decisions that she doesn't remember making but that face her none-the-less is told to take all that angst "to the bar".

Last night I realized that my personal bar is life drawing. It fixes everything wrong in me, and it balances me, creating a perfect zen of work that is at once constricting and freeing. It is hard and it is worth doing.

Twelve hours of straight drawing a moving figure leaves you raw and stripped. It also knocks down your barriers and breaks through your walls.

I am thankful I went, glad I had the strength to stay until dawn (with every passing year the stamina it takes is more fleeting) and happy with what I have to show after 12 late night hours at my Alma Mater. Most of all I am thankful that I have something that is mine, and something that always makes sense, even when other things might seem a hazy shade of winter.

I've uploaded some of my butcher paper favorites to my FlickR account.

I'll show off the monotone watercolors I did over the course of the evening in the next day or so.

If you haven't had the chance to draw the figure in a while, I suggest writing and filling yourself a prescription. It just might be the thing you've been missing.