Always Drawing: How to Start and Keep a Daily Sketchbook

Always Drawing opens less like a class and more like a monologue from a man who has filled sketchbooks for 23 years and wants you to understand why that matters before he shows you anything. Mike Lowery, a New York Times bestselling illustrator, spends the first three lessons on pure motivation: what a sketchbook is for, why the polished pages people post online are not the whole story, and why mistakes belong in the book as much as successes do. It is a reasonable way to open a beginner course, but it also means the first third of a 38-minute class contains no drawing instruction at all.

The materials section is the closest thing to a technical core here. Lowery walks through his actual kit on camera: a Uni-ball Vision pen for its quick-drying, water-safe line, a Tombow brush pen for variation, a Kuretake brush pen for its firm rubbery tip, Posca acrylic markers for flat opaque color fills, and a homemade gray wash made from a few drops of India ink stirred into a glass of water. He demonstrates each one by drawing small bats and shapes on camera, which gives the segment a genuine show-and-tell feel rather than a slide of product names. He is careful to frame this as his personal preference rather than a required kit, which is honest but also means the class stops short of teaching anyone how to choose materials for their own hand or style.

Two exercises carry real instructional weight. The first-page exercise tackles the blank-page problem directly: rather than demanding a masterpiece, Lowery has you write your contact information, then fill the page with quick doodles of things you already know, in his case an old keyboard, a beard, a synthesizer, a guitar pedal. It reframes the opening spread as low-stakes inventory rather than a debut performance, and it is genuinely useful advice for anyone who has bought a nice sketchbook and then frozen. The second is the 30-minutes-a-day challenge, presented less as a technique than a scheduling problem, with Lowery bluntly telling students to trade phone games or a TV episode for drawing time.

The two travel sketchbook tours, from Russia and India, function as inspiration rather than instruction. They show pages of Soviet arcade machines, enamel pins, market food, and travel anecdotes, and they do communicate that a sketchbook can double as a journal, but neither tour explains how he composed a page or made drawing-from-memory decisions. Viewers hoping to learn travel sketching technique will find themselves watching Lowery narrate his own vacation instead.

What the class ultimately delivers is permission and a starting ritual, not a skills curriculum. There is no instruction on drawing fundamentals, perspective, or composition, and the promised "wait, what should I draw" problem is resolved by pointing viewers to a second, separate paid class rather than answering it here. For someone who has never kept a sketchbook and needs a nudge plus a simple first move, that combination of pep talk, materials tour, and two workable exercises is enough to get a book open and a pen moving. For anyone past that stage, there is not much new here.

What you will learn

• ·Why keeping a daily sketchbook builds confidence, style, and a personal record worth revisiting
• ·A working list of Lowery's own tools: Uni-ball Vision pens, Tombow and Kuretake brush pens, Posca acrylic markers, and a homemade India ink wash
• ·How to make a gray ink wash by diluting India ink in water for quick tonal shading
• ·A concrete first-page exercise that turns blank-page fear into a simple self-portrait and doodle warm-up
• ·The 30-minutes-a-day challenge as a structural habit, including how to actually protect that time
• ·That a sketchbook can double as a travel journal, shown through his Russia and India trip pages