🎨 Random art musing incoming!
Access to cheap paper was probably the biggest factor in learning to draw for me.
The department secretary at my Dad's work knew he had a couple of little girls and she used to save all of the old pink and blue xeroxes for him to give to us so we could draw on their backs. (Thank you so much, Lucy!)
Then my dad got a dot matrix printer for his computer at home, and he bought two 5000-sheet boxes of paper for it. I guess he thought he'd go through it as quickly as his office did, but several years later by the time he got his first inkjet we'd only gone through much less than half of the first box.
No one wanted to spend time tearing the little edge strips off the dot matrix paper, so he got new inkjet paper and the 7.5k+ pieces of paper were just sitting in their boxes under the printer desk collecting dust because nobody else wanted them - and I just latched onto that. I used to tear out a bunch of sheets at a time and I'd carry them to school in my folders and draw on them.
Today plain recycled inkjet paper is pretty damn cheap (and I would recommend it to anyone with a bad case of Sketchbook Angst). I still keep a stack around so that I have guilt-free scrap paper and sometimes I still like to sketch on it over using my "proper" sketchbook.
The really great thing about having an abundance of cheap paper when you're learning is that you never have to be afraid you're wasting it, and that can really free your mind.
@levitea Cheap paper is an amazing thing to have! I remember drawing on unwanted dot matrix paper as a kid as well. I recently dug a bunch of it out of some ancient boxes and bound it into a couple of little sketchbooks. The texture where I tore the little edge bits off looks super interesting in book form. :D
@levitea that was a good read! And yeah, I also remember all sorts of random "work" paper that I doodled on as a kid (the oddest being the backs of unfolded shaving razor packaging, from some temporary gig my mother's friend had). Good times. Though my academic art education started with my parents saying "it's time you stopped wasting paper" so there's some sad memory to it too. I used to have weird issues with sketchbooks from time to time but now using one is like a way to check if I'm OK.