Sketching.

This was a very short sketching session, but I like what came of it

A sketch is mostly a quick and rough outline of a finished work, it's kind of the skeleton on which the artist will have the muscles and skin of the work stand. A sketch is kind of like taking note of an idea to work on it later.
Most of the time, it takes place on paper with a pencil, but it can definitely be done with pen or whatever the artist has at the moment. It can also be done right on the canvas, if the artist doesn't want to draw on the canvas and will just start working right away with brush and paint, I think this is called painting "a la prima" or something >_>

ANYWAY, sketching is very important for an artist to do everyday as exercise to keep his or her drawing hand limber and as a form of constant study of the forms that surround us. Depending how it's done, it will help one to work faster, make more precise lines and be more accurate in the drawing.

Sketching is something I don't do nearly enough, I hardly ever really just sketch and that's probably why I find it so difficult to draw the body or the face in a lot of different positions and my work tends to come out really stiff and immobile. BUT, when I DO, even if it's just a couple of pages of sketches, I can see and feel myself working progressively faster and better. So, srsly, I should sketch more and stop dicking around with that.
An artist can sketch anything, he/she feels like at the moment or based on whatever he likes working on most; in my case, it's the human body, so my sketches usually revolve around that: different positions and angles of the human body and face.
Sketches, because they're outlines, don't have a lot of detail and not a lot of shading.

These are two things that were meant to be sketches, but I got carried away XD

I LIKE shading, so I tend to concentrate on that, instead of moving on to the next sketch and a lot of times, I just end up with a finished drawing XD
Back in school, the drawing teacher would time us and give us shorter sketching time for the next sketch and we didn't do it a lot, but even one session of that was INCREDIBLE progress.

This and the other sketches that don't say so, are from a single sketching session that I pulled the finger out and actually worked on like three or four pages