This Christmas, my friend Beth sent me a pocket sketchbook that she had had made for me. It's beautifully crafted and perfectly portable.

A couple of years ago, I took an acrylic landscape painting course with an artist from the States, and he's been generous enough to create a couple of private facebook groups where anyone who has taken a course with him can post pictures of their work, ask questions or share tips. The people in the group represent the entire gamut of talent and experience, but the most wonderful feature of this collection of over 1100 members is that they are unfailingly positive, nurturing and friendly. It's become a comfortable place to share and to follow along. 

For the New Year, the artist who originally set this up has begun what he calls a ''Sketchbook challenge'' where he posts a weekly video including a demonstration and then suggestions for exercises. He believes that good drawing skills are at the foundation of a good painting. You can't have one without the other. One of the things that surprised me the most was that many more painters than you would imagine don't draw particularly well, if at all. 

The first instalment of the class was very basic, focussing on line weight and simple outline drawings of basic objects like leaves or rocks. I watched the lesson and did the homework. But I also had the urge to pull out Beth's little sketchbook and do a quick drawing of the photo of Soleil that I put on the blog yesterday. This is just a sketch, upon which I spent 20 minutes or so. It was a great little creative escape on what turned out to be a busy day, and it encouraged me to keep the sketchbook nearby and make time to do this on a daily basis, or as near as possible to a daily basis as I can manage. 

I'm looking forward to filling up this sketchbook with similar such vignettes - not all dogs by the way! - and then retrospectively looking back at the progress that happens. I'm not one for making resolutions or embarking on projects just because it's the new year, but this seems to have fallen into my lap, as if it were meant to be.