Friday Loose Leaf: Transition Pages

Drawing before drawing.

I just finished responding to emails. Before that, I was grading student work. My mind is still in that mode—fragmented, task-oriented, jumping from one thing to the next. But now I need to draw. I need to work on the illustrations.

I have trouble flipping the switch.

So I do something that might look like procrastination but isn’t. I fill pages with small drawings. Quick sketches, nothing precious. Simple materials—graphite, colored pencil, ink. I don’t think too much while I’m working on them. They’re small to avoid overworking. They’re fast so I don’t get too carried away. And they are often messy.

I call them my transition pages.

People talk about warming up before creative work, and I used to think that’s what I was doing. Warming up my hand, loosening my muscles, getting the blood flowing. All those gesture drawings done at the beginning of figure drawing class. It is like stretching before a run. But that’s not really what’s happening. Maybe there is something physical—not loosening muscles exactly, but finding a rhythm. The pace of my hand moving across the page. The weight of the pencil. A kind of physical settling that happens alongside the mental shift. What needs to change is my attention, maybe? My mode of being? The quality of presence I’m bringing to the work.

I can’t rush it. I rely on the transition.

The fragmented attention required by emails and administrative tasks is different from what drawing requires. Drawing needs focus, yes, but also a kind of openness or ease. A willingness to follow where the line wants to go. To notice what’s happening on the page and respond to it. You can’t do that while your brain is still composing responses to messages.

These transition pages are my buffer zone. Hands settling into the rhythm they need. My mind shifting gears from doing to making. It rarely takes a whole page and I can feel when it happens—when my breathing changes, when my shoulders drop, and I stop thinking about what I need to do later and start paying attention to what’s happening right now, at the tip of my pen.

I’m curious—am I the only one who needs this? Do you have rituals or practices that help you cross the threshold from one mode of attention to another? What do your transition pages look like? Or if not pages, what do you do to shift from the scattered attention of daily life into the focused presence that making requires?

I’d love to know I’m not alone in this.