A page can hold a pause.

For the first study, I drew only the gaps. The clouds over the rooftops were a loose, complicated group, and every attempt to outline them became busier than the view. Instead I shaded the clear spaces between them with the side of a blue pencil. The paper became cloud almost by accident. It was the lightest drawing of the morning.

The second study used one soft pencil and no eraser. I made a small rectangle, divided the sky into three broad tones, and stopped before the marks became a picture of every curl and fold. A dark lower edge gave the pale shapes enough weight. Leaving the rest alone was the difficult part of the exercise.

For the third, I returned to the same window after lunch. The morning’s shapes were gone, but the arrangement of roofs gave me an anchor. I drew the new sky on the facing page. Side by side, the studies described a change that I would otherwise have remembered simply as “a cloudy day.”

The diagram on this page shows those ideas as a set of open and closed shapes. It is a schematic, not a copied sketch. In the actual notebook there are crooked borders, pencil smudges, and a line where I rested the cup. Those marks do not weaken the exercise. They put the drawing back inside the day when it happened.