Four Lines

I was browsing some art sites and happened across some Picasso and Matisse. I was impressed at how spare they could be, capturing the essence of a thing with just a few simple strokes of a pen. Soooo, I thought I'd try it myself.

Here are the rules:

Four simple lines
No shading, no color, no variation in width of the stroke.
Each line drawn in one long in one long continuous freehand stroke.
Each work to consist of four perfect strokes; mess up the fourth one, you start over.
No erasers, do-overs, no digital cleanup allowed.

It's a lot harder than it seems. You have to capture what the object feels like, not its appearance.

I went through a lot of paper, maybe a hundred attempts to get one acceptable sketch. Of course, I've not yet gotten a perfect one. :-)