If you have a fast Internet connection to FurAffinity and you are accessing it during a non-peak hour, each picture you click on comes right up on your screen almost as soon as you finish clicking on it. For those of us who do not or we are clicking on a pic when half the planet seems to be clicking on it, it takes a while for the picture to appear.

So what do you do while waiting? Look out the window? Watching the snow come down outside loses it’s entertainment value after the tenth or eleventh time you look and see the same thing -- whiteness. So, I doodle or sketch to pass the seconds.

There is a hierarchy of cataloging artistic effort. The ultimate effort is the full-fledged picture wherein everything is as it should be and every effort has been made to correct every mistake. At the other end of the hierarchy, at the very bottom, are the doodles. Doodles for me are unintelligible scribbles wherein I make no effort what so ever to attempt a resemblance to a person, place or thing. It is merely an exercise is laying out shapes and forms for my imagination. Two straight lines and an oval for an arm and a hand. A great big line down … well you get the idea.

Sketches for me on the other hand are made to resemble people, places and things – at least in a rough form. You may not recognize the person, or know where the place is, but at least you can tell the trees from the people. I let mistakes in proportion and minor placement in a sketch go uncorrected. However I do generally try to keep to the proper number of eyes, ears, noses and mouths. When my attention is only focused on the sketch for ten or twelve seconds before the picture I clicked on finally appears on my monitor, “generally” usually suffices.

So, with the intention of improving my skills at drawing wolves in the foreseeable future, here is the first of my wolf head sketches, mistakes and all.