Timelapse of me drawing a salamander, on Vimeo.

A resolution of mine for this year is to draw every day.

Drawing has been a part of my life since my earliest memories of childhood, and it’s a way I explore and understand the world, my ideas, and my feelings.

When I was about 10 years old, I determined I’d like to be “a bird artist.” I didn’t really know what a bird artist was, I had never met one, but I knew that I liked birds, and I liked to draw, and my illustrated bird guides (displaying the work of John James Audubon, Roger Tory Peterson, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes) at times literally took away my breath with the wonder and beauty of the natural world.

Shortly before I switched my career from graphic designer to college professor, there was a transitional period when I visited a display of natural science illustration at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and was so inspired I nearly took that path. As it has turned out, drawing animals and plants has remained a consistently enriching and joyful avocation for my entire life.

I’m in the middle of a project of science documentation and communication about amphibians, so frogs and salamanders have been obvious and rewarding subjects for my daily discipline of filling sketchbooks in 2013.

Especially for a visual thinker like me, drawing is an invaluable tool for learning and understanding my amphibian subjects. Their anatomical features and species identifiers, even behavioral characteristics, become more clear the closer I look. And the more I draw them, the closer my scrutiny becomes.

Long hard days at work, periods of illness, personal setbacks, and other  frustrations in my life are mitigated with a pencil and paper. It’s been this way for me since I was a child, and my plan is to keep it that way for every last day of my life.