Charcoal #2 (Sketch of the Week for Week 45 of 2025)

This is my second attempt at sketching in charcoal. Instead of using a charcoal pencil (as I did in my first stab, which I wasn’t happy with), I used some old willow charcoal my wife had kicking around. This stuff is literally just charred sticks. It’s not nearly as dark as charcoal pencils, tending to more gray than black. But it is so soft that you can practically erase a line just by rubbing it out with your fingertips. It’s a blunt tool, but incredibly forgiving. As you build up layers of it working toward black, it basically grinds down to powdery ash. Drawing with it is half drawing and half finger-painting. Very fun and liberating, if you can release yourself from needing to control how things go.

A sketched portrait of a man done in soft willow charcoal

Hard Lines and Dissolution (Sketches of the Week for Week 44 of 2025)

Week 44 was another “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.”

My son characterized several sketches from this week as looking like “ghosts unwillingly dissolving.”

Pencil sketch of a face dissolving into shadows, caught somewhat closer to agony than ecstasy

Pencil sketch of a face looming out of shadows, caught in something like quite reflection

With that second sketch he noted that “the background shadows and the face shadows really look cut from the same cloth. That’s really hard to do but I think you did it there.”

I see what he’s saying, but in this case it was totally unintentional. It was only about a week later that I was clicking through various screenshots of old drawing instructional books I found on Pinterest, and saw a discussion of the problem of hard lines in primarily tonal studies. In both cases it was the use/absence of hard lines that got the effect that made them striking (on the upper sketch the left edge of the face has a hard delineation while the right is allowed to “dissolve”; on the lower the face is framed entirely in shadow, with no precise hard outline).

I wouldn’t have put all that together without his feedback. For my part, I just liked the emotions that wound up on the page.

Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn’t even really a change: the “new logo” closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This “change” triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company’s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN and Restaurant Business). Much of the “real” complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I’ve seen a string of mediocre “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of “thought leadership” invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( 🤖✨ writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven’t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other—and causing real harm in the mix—and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind…oy.🤦‍♀️

In the Dark is the Dark (Sketches of the Week for Week 43 of 2025)

Week 43 was “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.” Deep shadows are fun, because the visual and emotional impact is often inversely proportional to the effort. This is definitely a realm where knowing when to take the drawing away from yourself pays off.

My son thought this was the sketch of the week: “I like the way middle right seems to lean in a little. Makes it look the spookiest.”

A pencil sketch of a young woman looming out of the darkness.

I sorta preferred this one from earlier in the week:

A pencil sketch of a bearded man lit from above with hard shadows that make him look like a floating skull.

This sketch was the hardest—in that I erased everything and started over several times—and the easiest, once I stopped listening to a brain that was telling me “this is an eye! this is a nose! those are lips, you idiot!” and just put black where I saw black. I sorta love how the lighting make so clear that there’s a skull under that skin and meat. If anything, my failure here is that I didn’t go for blacker blacks.

If you can turn off your brain and just let your eye tell your hand where the black goes, hardshadowed, dramatic chiaroscuro actually almost makes for the easiest sketches.

Archive.org brings you Halloween Treats! 🍬🍭🎃👻🔪💉👶⚰️

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" cover

I’ve spoken at length about the Satanic Panic in the past, especially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse—which was a real book that was earnestly written and actually published in order to (traumatically) teach children and parents how to recognize the signs of something that was believed to be an epidemic when I was a kid, but in fact never ever ever happened to anyone (more details, with links to sources, at my original post).

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" ritual

Sadly, I’d never come across a print copy of the complete book. Happily, that no longer matters because the good folks at Archive.org have digitized it and you can now read the whole thing online for free:

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse on Archive.org

(As an added bonus, Archive.org also has this law enforcement training video on Satanic Cults from 1994! Again: real resources for taking real actions in the real world to address a made-up thing, often with disastrous consequences for people who did nothing wrong.)

The full text of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is worth a look. Seeing the whole book really does underscore that this was a well-intentioned project (and even decently trauma informed, for the period). But those good intentions were tragically misdirected, literally paving a road to hell for some folks who were accused of imagined atrocities.

I suppose there is a lesson there, America. I don’t imagine we’ll learn it.

Sketching glitches (Sketch of the Week for Week 42 of 2025)

No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them 🤷‍♀️

This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an older man in a tie.

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an autumn tree.

I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.

The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.

You Are Beautiful. Watch this video…

Watch their faces. It’s fascinating how often you can see the cognitive dissonance, the battle of voices triggered in an average human’s head by being told they are beautiful. I don’t think this was the filmmaker’s point—in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the opposite—but it’s kind of heartbreaking. Why the hell should it be so hard to be told you are beautiful?

This video is ten years old. All of these kids are adults now (hopefully). Gott in Himmel how I wish there was a follow-up video of each of them being shown this video.

Tree and Bench [NOT PICTURED: all of humanity] (Sketch of the Week for Week 40 of 2025)

Week 40 was “Tree Week” in my journal, where I worked on capturing more different kinds of trees under different lighting conditions. It didn’t go superterrific, but my son liked this one because the overall composition communicated the scale nicely, and it captured something of the late-day autumn light in Michigan, which has an oddly specific angle and saturation.

A pencil sketch of a tree near a bench and pathway, caught in the deep slanting light of late-day Michigan autumn.

I’m sharing it not because it’s especially good, but just because it puts me in the mind of Edward Hopper, who I think captured the unique (and uniquely enduring) dimensions of American Loneliness better than any other artist who has yet lived.

My glass is neither half full nor half empty… (Sketch of the Week for Week 39 of 2025)

… because it isn’t a glass of water; it’s just a sketch. But I like how I began to capture the light here. I didn’t get it right, but I got closer than I think I’ve gotten on any sketch before, and I really do love light and shadow and refraction.

A pencil sketch of a glass of water, half full

That said, I did a terrible job of capturing “glass” in this glass. Here’s one of my father’s finished drawings on a similar theme (though no water; his glass was entirely empty. Let that be a lesson to you.)

A finished drawing of an empty drinking glass by David Robert Nelson (z"l)

I’ve always loved this drawing, how precise and controlled it is, how it makes a flat white page into a space one can occupy. I suppose there’s a lesson there, too: the hours upon hours spent making a small orderly corner of the world where every lines makes sense and can be justified and defended, and the whole thing can be secured in a frame unchanging, so you can keep looking back at it and knowing it is there exactly as it should be.