If you have begun to feel that you’ve become unaccountably distant from life, that is, perhaps you keep finding a phone camera between your eyes and the world, then it’s time to take a good look at yourself and fix this problem. And I don’t mean by taking another selfie.

The solution to this anomie for many people, whether they are “artistic” or not, can be found in a new book by John Hendrix, Drawing is Magic. With the subtitle, Finding Yourself in a Sketchbook, you begin to get the idea.

Because there are so many ways to find yourself—or, to get over yourself, if that's an issue—you could as easily be intimidated by the book's fun and busily inky pages as you might be by a clean new sketchbook with blank white pages. [Clue: the artist insists that you use a pen, any pen, even a Bic, never a pencil. It’s essential that you make a commitment to making your marks.]

But never mind, here’s some great advice to launch you in new directions: If you treat your sketchbook like a playground, it will turn into a Treasure Map. You will be reminded, again and again, in many different ways, to HAVE FUN!  For example, Draw Some Stuff You Love. Trust Your Imagination. Expect Failure [that’s a good one – you learn through practice, and that means Drawing Every Day, as much as you can, so You may just forget to worry about making a Bad Drawing and make a Good One by accident.

Or if you draw all the time for work—as an illustrator or designer, for example—maybe you need to change it up. Many artists sketch ideas on loose sheets of paper because they need the freedom to make discards as fast as they make sketches on the way to visually defining an assignment. If you are one of these, Drawing is Magic might just shake your tree in ways you’ve been wondering about.

So here are just a few of the ideas inside this useful volume:
It is 100x easier to edit than to create. Don’t veto anything.
Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good—thanks, M. Voltaire.
Illustrate [a page full] of fortune cookie fortunes with an image [for each fortune].
Knowing yourself can help you to know your ideas.
Academic drawing values accuracy. Drawing by heart values enjoyment.
Enjoyment without strings attached is a basic building block for igniting creative passion for your work.

If you need a little more to get going in the right direction, go to John’s blog and take the “Drawn Interview” from the Drawing is Magic exercise, here. 
You have 8 days left to sign up for the Drawing is Magic book give-away, here.
You can visit his DIM blog, here, and John’s blog, here. 

You can meet John on Monday, April 6th, 6:30-8:30 at Society of Illustrators. 128 East 63rd Street, NY, NY. Tickets.

Drawing is Magic: Discovering yourself in a Sketchbook (STC Craft | A Melanie Falick Book 2015) will be in stores next week (preorder here).

Read John’s DART Artist Q&A here.

John Hendrix is an associate professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis. His illustrations have appeared in many publications, including Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times. He is the author of Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek and John Brown. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.