2nd entry for Aug 2, 2015

Not every drawing day is a good one. These are four 5-minute studies above, and two 10-minute ones below. It was not a good day for proportions staying in control, and I was having to work more slowly and redraw contours a lot to get them to work with  Pat's forms. The 5's are done with no preliminary marks, which for me makes the drawing especially high-focus as an activity, and more stressy in the moment - at least when things aren't flowing. With ink there's no retraction of marks, so every moment hold the potential for collapse if my attention or hand wavers.
10 minutes and up I have time enough to do some looser sketching, to block in key forms in pencil. I try to keep that to 2-3 minutes, or there's no time left. Loose pencil marks are open-ended, non-stressy and help catch the most egregious proportion problems. But losing the feeling of drawing on the edge of a cliff means the ink lines are different when aided by a pencil sketch; they can lose some of their tension and `bite' as marks.
An idea that interests me currently is what is the least amount of pencil sketch that would support a line drawing the most, and eat the least time in the bargain. Drawing things twice over is redundant; what is the most organic effective shorthand for me? What info do I absolutely need, and what can I fill in with a more detailed line?