The Power of Sketch: Mike Perry on Process, Play, and Drawing the Same Shapes Forever
Mike Perry lives in a colorful world on and off the page. Photo by Anna Wolf.
If there is one thing you can count on at a Creatives & Coffee event, it's the rain. True to form, the skies opened up again last Thursday. But this time? We outsmarted the forecast. The event was virtual — take that, Mother Nature! Not a single drop hit our caffeine-fueled crowd.
Instead, more than 50 people from across time zones (and even continents!) cozied up around their screens to hear from artist Mike Perry. He pulled back the curtain on how he builds the bold, whimsical visual languages that make his work feel like a technicolor dream.
For Perry, drawing isn’t just an art form – it’s a language he’s been learning, stretching, and reinventing since childhood. “I’m a firm dyslexic, which is annoying, but it’s also a gift,” he said. “It forced me to think differently about how I communicate. Early on, drawing became a more natural way to express myself than written words. I was more interested in the shapes of letters than what they were supposed to mean.”
Perry’s work for Hermès is whimsical and oh-so-cool. Ilustration above and window display below.
This obsession with shape, form, and visual rhythm still defines Perry’s process. Best known for his vivid compositions that have appeared everywhere from Broad City to Hermès, Perry keeps his daily artistic life grounded in something remarkably simple: the sketchbook.
“I’ve basically been drawing the same things over and over again, just slightly adapted each time,” he said. “It’s this lifelong loop, and the sketchbook is where it all begins.”
Perry’s sketchbooks travel with him everywhere. He even sews extra pockets into his coats to keep them close. These analog companions are filled with random thoughts, pictures of friends, and doodles of all stripes. “I think everything is just boobs, penises, and vaginas,” he said. “These are eternal, human shapes that we just keep recombining to say new things.”
His relationship to sketching is fundamentally non-precious. Perry doesn’t edit himself, or seek outside approval. “My sketchbook isn’t for anyone else,” he said. “Because of that, I don’t judge myself when I make terrible drawings. If I mess up a page, I turn to the next one.”
Over time, those free, instinctive sketches become the building blocks of much larger, more refined pieces. “By the time I get to making a huge, complicated drawing — like something for Hermès — I’ve already done a lot of the hard part in my sketchbook,” he explained. “I’ve made the decisions in miniature, figured out the order and characters, and the essence of the final drawing is in there.”
He likens it to writing. “You can have a sentence in your head, but you have to learn how to put the words together in the right order to actually say something.”
That doesn’t mean he process is easy, even for Perry. Some things that seem basic — like anatomy — are ongoing puzzles. “The human thumb is still hard,” he said. “I’ve drawn it on the wrong side of the hand so many times. But that’s part of it. You make the mistake, you figure it out, and you try again.”
Another lesson? When you veer off course, consider leaning into it. For example, Perry grew up in Missouri and loves horses. “They’re mythic,” he said. “They’re also hard as hell to draw. Their legs bend in ways that make no sense. I get it wrong all the time. I’m okay with that now. I just draw weird horses.”
Since Creatives & Coffee is all about jumpstarting the day with a burst of creativity, we couldn’t let everyone log off without making something. Inspired by Perry’s playful approach to sketching, we challenged the audience with a quick exercise straight from Perry’s brain.
The prompt: Think of a doodle or shape that’s followed you through life — something you’ve drawn again and again. Then, in just three minutes, draw two versions of it: the original, and a new remix that reflects your creative style today.
Three minutes doesn’t sound like much, but the results proved otherwise. We got everything from a beautifully-shaded ball composition, to that iconic “S” from every middle school notebook, to a hot dog (yes, inspired by Mike’s take on anatomy).
In the end, though, it really wasn’t about what people drew, as much as that they keeping drawing — even if it's the same thing for twenty years. That’s the heart of Perry’s philosophy: keep showing up, keep exploring, keep getting it a little more wrong in order to eventually get it right.
“You don’t always need to know what a sketch is for,” he said. “Not today. Maybe not for five or 10 years. Just make it. Make it badly. And trust that it’ll find its place when the time is right.”
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Sponsored by Adobe, Creatives & Coffee is about going inside a professional’s creative process, exercises, and principles and then applying a new idea to one’s own work through an interactive exercise.
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