My son made custom Valentines for his classmates – assigning them to a Greek God and sketching a symbol for each.
I sat and helped him with inking the drawings – tracing his sketches and then erasing the original pencil.
It’s so satisfying to remove all of those rough sketch marks and finalize the drawing – the drawings become so much more polished and clear in the process.
The same thing happens in the process of preparing for a performance. When you present the music to the audience, it is ideally the inked version. All the false starts, wrong tempo choices, sloppy cutoffs, unbalanced diminuendos, and so on are erased by the performance. In that moment, we are inking the piece into place after weeks or months of sketching.