Something I noticed while sorting old sketchbooks this week: the pages from my architecture days, drawn in a hurry between site visits, are looser and better than anything I've done since I started taking painting seriously.

Same hand, same pen. The only difference is that back then nobody was going to look at it. Now I sit down to a fresh page and the line gets careful, and careful is death for ink. I did a corner house in Basavanagudi on Sunday, one of those with the madras-tile roof and the green shutters, and I caught myself going back over a balcony railing to fix it up. Ruined the whole rhythm of it. The railing is now the only neat thing on a page of scribble.

I've started doing a throwaway warm-up page before the "real" one, just to get the cautiousness out of my system. Half the time the warm-up is the one worth keeping.

Curious whether this happened to anyone else when they went from hobby to calling it their work. Does the seriousness creep into your hand?