Drawing is the most direct record of what the hand knows — less mediated than painting, more honest than description, a line made in real time that cannot fully be corrected, only continued. The illustrator who makes images in service of someone else's text learns something about collaboration that the solitary maker may not: that to interpret another's vision honestly sometimes requires surrendering your own preferred readings. To draw every day is to slowly build a vocabulary that is only yours, made of every observed thing the eye has learned to hold.
Each step builds on the last.