Contrast

This is what tends to put me off from drawing. Depending on my mood, the time of day, and any number of obscure planetary alignments, I can draw either reasonably good stuff or completely crappy things, often right next to each other and in the same session (though crappy stuff tends to breed more crappy stuff out of frustration).
Greens are "good", red is bad. Actually the green ones have technical flaws in themselves, especially the top one, but they carry some kind of "life" which makes me happy with them, and I know there was a clear feeling while making them that I could see where I was going and knew what to do. By contrast, the red face was a struggle all the way, and it's evident that I pressed down hard on the pencil in frustration to try and correct mistakes without really thinking about where I went.
It's almost entirely a mental struggle with attitude, patience and temper. That's what makes it so difficult - I know that I already possess the skills to draw at a certain level (proven by results), but it's only accessible to me when I can relax and go about it in an inspired and loose manner.
Confidence is what I lack, premature self-criticism what I have in abundance.

Semirelatedly, one thing that I've noticed is the benefit of a quick glance at reference photography before starting to draw, even if the reference isn't referred back to during the rest of the drawing. Getting an initial "seed" of reality and direction can fuel the sketch even if most of the refinement is done from imagination alone, and it's almost certainly more focused and educational to spend all your time looking carefully at your drawing rather than to go back and forth between it and some pedestaled reference that reminds you of how inaccurate your copy is.

I need to draw more and think less. It is the truth.

Coil

Just a couple of random sketches today. After doing a few, I noticed a trend in dynamic poses that there's often a curve or line of tension reaching through the body like a wound spring or coil, waiting to be released when the action is performed (be it a running step or a kick/punch etc). It probably has something to do with building up leverage in the opposite end of the body, in the form of mass that can drive and balance the motion to deliver maximum force in whatever is the key element (fist or foot for instance).

I imagine that a football player arches backwards, extending his abdominal muscles and moving the arm opposite his kicking leg back, before moments later compressing all his frontal muscles leading to an opposing contraction of the body, with the leg being thrust forward forcefully and balanced by the arm and upper torso bending forward at the same time.

Seen like that, most such "coil" action seems to happen diagonally through the body, across an arm and a leg. It makes for nice poses anyway (not really put to use in the larger sketches on this page, as they were drawn before I thought of this).
You have to play the action back and forth in your head to figure out what should happen before and after the imaged moment and thereby how the figure should be posed to appear most sensible. It's no doubt a healthy mental exercise, and stick figures are quick and painless to draw so I guess this should be a more common element in my sketch routine...

Ride gets bumpy

I will probably be missing days here and there from now on. Going up to stay with my folks for a few weeks, vacation-style. I'll likely draw a bunch but I might do so at my leisure and just upload "the good stuff" every other day or so.

New ambition

I guess it's not "inanimate objects" anymore. I'll leave it at "anything I please" until further notice. Will probably do a period of "non-referenced people" at some point, since that's one of my ultimate goals with this drawing thing, and I don't try it often enough.

Shoe

I was going to draw both shoes but ended up spending so much time on this one that doing it all over again for the other seemed like a bore.

On another note, I realized that categorizing trees as "inanimate objects" might have been a questionable thing... but after checking some dictionaries it seems that the word "inanimate" is sometimes used to differentiate between moving animal-like objects and stationary ones without any obvious signs of life (with plants given as an explicit example of this). I will let it slide. Perhaps we'll see a tree tomorrow?

Ambition

Will try to make daily sketch posts here on the topic of 'inanimate objects'. Stuff like buildings, trees, lamps and computer mice. Starting tomorrow, of course ;)