I keep two sketchbooks. One is a hardbound 5½ by 8½ that lives in my bag and gets drawn in on the train, in the coffee shop on the corner where they let me sit for three hours on one refill, and in the back of lectures. The other is this page. This one has no drawings in it yet, which I know is a strange thing for a sketchbook, and I'll explain why further down. What it has is the part of drawing that isn't the drawing: what I'm learning, what I'm using, what I keep getting wrong, and what I'm looking at.

I'm in my second year at art school in the city. I'm 20. I draw from life, mostly the figure, mostly in charcoal, and I am not very good yet. I'm putting that in writing so that in two years I can look back at this page and see whether it's still true.

None of this is mine. All of it came from a teacher, and most of it from a teacher who was repeating a teacher. I write it down because I forget it every time I pick up the charcoal and remember it about twenty minutes in.

1. Draw every day. Not well. Just every day. Ten minutes of a coffee cup counts. The hand forgets faster than you'd think, and the eye forgets faster than the hand.
2. Measure with your pencil. Hold it out at arm's length, elbow locked, close one eye, and use your thumb on the pencil to take a length off the model (the head, usually). Then see how many of those go into the rest. A standing figure is about seven and a half heads tall, but don't trust that, trust the pencil. The elbow has to be locked or every measurement is a different length.
3. Squint. Squinting blurs out the detail and leaves you with the big light shapes and the big dark shapes. That's the drawing. Everything else is decoration on top of it. If a drawing looks wrong and I can't tell why, I squint at the drawing and then at the model, and usually the darks are in different places.
4. Big shapes first. The whole figure in the first two minutes, lightly, badly. Then fix it. If I start with the eye, I get a beautiful eye in the upper left corner of a torso that runs off the page.
5. Look at the model more than the paper. My figure teacher says the ratio should be about three to one. I am probably at one to one on a good day.
6. Draw the space around the thing. The gap between the arm and the body is a shape. Draw that shape and the arm takes care of itself.
7. Plumb lines. Hold the pencil straight up and down in front of the model and see what falls under what. The ear over the shoulder? The knee over the toe? It fixes more standing figures than anything else.
8. Don't erase for the first ten minutes. Draw through the mistake. The wrong lines tell you where the right one is.
9. Keep the bad ones. I have a portfolio under the bed of drawings I wanted to burn. Every few months I look through it and something in there is better than I remembered, and everything in there is worse than what I'm doing now, which is the whole point.
10. Stop before you ruin it. Still learning this one. Probably always will be.

People think art supplies are expensive. Paint is expensive. Drawing is nearly free, which is one reason I love it.

• Vine charcoal. Thin sticks of burnt willow, soft and gray and dusty, and it wipes off with a finger or a rag. This is what I do most of my drawing with. It's forgiving. It's also so light that a hard breath rearranges it, which is why fixative exists.
• Compressed charcoal. Charcoal pressed into a hard black stick. Much darker than vine and much harder to erase. I save it for the last ten minutes, for the darkest darks, after the drawing is settled. If I start with it I can't take anything back.
• A kneaded eraser. The gray putty kind. You pull and fold it to clean it and pinch it to a point to lift out a highlight. It's as much a drawing tool as the charcoal is: you draw the lights with it. Mine is about the size of a walnut and completely black.
• Newsprint, 18 by 24. Cheap, thin, gray-ish paper, a pad of 100 sheets for a few dollars. This is for the fast drawings: gestures, warm-ups, anything under twenty minutes. It yellows and gets brittle in a year, and that's fine. It's not supposed to last.
• A pad of better drawing paper for the long poses, heavier and whiter with a little tooth to it. Twice the price of newsprint and I use a quarter as much.
• A drawing board with two big clips, a chamois cloth for wiping big areas back to gray, a sandpaper block for pointing the charcoal, and a can of workable fixative, which you spray outside, on the fire escape, holding your breath, because it's awful.
• Two Conté crayons, a sanguine (the red-brown one) and a black, for when I'm tired of gray.
• The small sketchbook and a 2B pencil, for everywhere else.
• Coffee. A large, black. The name of the page is not a metaphor.

Figure Drawing II. Tuesday and Thursday mornings, three hours each, with a live model. We start with thirty-second gestures, a whole newsprint pad's worth, then two-minute, then five, and then one long pose for the second half. This semester the teacher has us working on the whole figure in the space of the room, not floating on the page: the floor line, the chair, the shadow. It's harder than it sounds. I'd gotten comfortable with a figure on a blank page and now the figure has to stand somewhere.

Introduction to Printmaking. Monday afternoons. Intaglio, mostly: scratching a drawing into a metal plate with a needle (drypoint), or coating the plate and drawing through the coating and letting acid bite the lines (etching), then inking the plate, wiping it, and running it through the press onto damp paper. Everything comes out backwards, and everything comes out different from how you drew it, and I've fallen a little bit in love with it. The studio smells like ink and solvent and the press is a hundred years old and weighs as much as a car.

Art History: Renaissance to the Present. Wednesday nights, slides in the dark. I take notes in the sketchbook, drawing the slides, which is the only way I remember them.

Color Theory. Friday mornings. Painting little squares of gouache, dozens and dozens of them. I complain about it every week and I'm learning more than I want to admit.

Here's the trouble. Charcoal drawings are 18 by 24 inches. The scanner in the school computer lab is letter size, and there's a line for it, and the lab monitor doesn't love it when you try to scan something in six pieces. My roommate's brother is supposed to be able to get me an hour on a big scanner at his office in October. Until then, I'll do what I do in art history and describe them, and you can draw them in your head.

Seated figure, back view, September 16. Forty-minute pose. The model sat on a stool with her back to us and her weight on one hip, so the whole spine curved like a question mark. Vine charcoal with the darks in compressed. The thing I'm happiest about is the shoulder blade, which I finally got to sit under the skin instead of drawn on top of it. The thing I'm unhappiest about is the stool, which is not quite on the floor.

Standing figure with plumb line, September 9. I left the plumb line in. You can see the light vertical I drew from her ear straight down, and how the weight-bearing foot lands right on it. I like drawings that show their scaffolding.

Six gestures, September 2. One sheet of newsprint, six thirty-second poses on top of each other in different corners. Just the motion of each one, nothing more. Some days these are the best drawings I make all week, and I think it's because there's no time to be afraid.

My own left hand, holding a coffee cup, August 30. Pencil, in the small book, at the corner coffee shop. A hand is the hardest thing there is and I've drawn mine probably two hundred times. This is not the best one but it's the most recent.

Drypoint, first plate, September 20. A pear on a windowsill, four inches square, printed in a warm black on cream paper. The lines have a soft burr to them that drypoint gives and pencil never does. I pulled five prints and the last one was the best, and then the burr started to wear and they got thinner. I'm going to frame the fourth one for my mother.

Everybody says go to museums, but nobody says what to do there, so: bring the small sketchbook and a pencil (they'll let you in with a pencil; they won't with charcoal or pens, ask at the desk), pick one drawing or one painting, and sit in front of it for half an hour. Copy it. Copy just the hand. You'll see more in that half hour than in three hours of walking.

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The drawings and prints galleries rotate what's out, so every visit is different, and the old master drawings up close are humbling. The suggested admission is a suggestion, which matters when you're a student.
• The Frick Collection, New York. Small, quiet, a house. You can stand a foot away from a painting with nobody behind you.
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York. For the drawings, and for seeing that people who could draw perfectly chose not to.
• The National Gallery of Art, Washington. Free, all of it, and the drawing collection is one of the best in the country. Take the train down.
• The Art Institute of Chicago. I've been once, on a school trip, and I want to go back for a week.
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art. The big staircase everybody runs up, and then inside, room after room, and hardly anybody in the drawing rooms.
• Any life drawing session, anywhere. Not a museum, but the best place to look at a figure is in a room with twenty other people drawing it.

On September 1 I made myself a rule: one drawing a day, outside of class, until the end of the year. Anything, any size, any length, but from life (no photos, no imagination), and finished enough that I'd show it to somebody. Here's the log. If a day is missing it's because I missed it, and I'm writing that down too.

23 drawings in 25 days. The rule stands. If you want to try it too, e-mail me and tell me what you drew. I'd like to know somebody else is doing it.