This week was fully devoted to African-American hair textures, mostly afros, because if you tend to start gesture sketches with conjoined blobs (rather than boxes or lines), then afros are hella fun.
(The title of this post is swiped from Zig Zag Claybourne’s afro-futurist novel. ZZC is a really fun guy, and a great author. I met him back when I used to do the SF cons in the Detroit Metro area. There’s a piece of advice I got from him at some point that I repeat almost daily as I slog through my current novel draft: “You have to tell a work-in-progress you love it every day.”)
This sketch is from Trying-to-Sketch-Pretty-Young-Women-So-They-Don’t-End-Up-Looking-Ancient-and_Monstrous Week—which is trickier than it sounds.
(People who draw already get what I’m getting at, but for normal people with normal hobbies: You draw by adding marks to the page, but a major part of how our culture codes both youth and beauty comes down to smooth marklessness. Thus, if you accurately capture all of the marks you actually see on an attractive woman’s face, the thing on the page will look like a scar-hatched, grotesque forest-hag come to devour children. More than elsewhere in sketching, the depiction of young attractive people requires enormous restraint, making each line do a shit-ton of work in expressing and implying what you want the viewer to see.)
Anyway, this is a failure from last week’s project, just less failed than the others—and that wasn’t why I was sharing it, anyway. My son pointed out that this really nicely visually captured the crinkly texture of how this style and type of hair feels. That really spoke to him, and so I share it here. It also may be of some interest to those tracking my progress in capturing hair in graphite.
My wife has been taking care of the neglected community garden at the local middle school, winding it down for the end of the year. As a result, there are dozens of little pumpkins on my porch, and last week was thus Pumpkin Week in my journal.
The sketch on the right was for a postcard I sent to my son, who is now way up at Michigan Tech, but has always been a fiend for Fall Decor (see below). The sketch on the left was done late in the day, after my wife had oiled our wooden dining room table. I often omit reflections when shadows are prominent, or vice versa. That sketch was the first time I ever questioned why I was doing that, and whether it might not be more fun to stop editing and just draw, for better or worse.
Otto in 2014-ish, mos def not loosing his shit in delight.
BONUS! Just in case the title got you mad nostalgic:
There’s a body shop on my daily walk that works in a lot of classic cars. The above shot is the reflection on the roof of a first gen burgundy Oldsmobile Toronado with a pearlized paint-job they’d been working on. I swear to god my dad briefly had a second or third gen Toronado in this same color (minus the glitter) when I was pre-school aged.
Extreme foreshortening is a really important compositional tool—it brings hella drama with little effort. It’s also hella mindbending: getting that sketch remotely right requires getting your brain to disregard all of the stuff it knows (A FIST IS WAAAAAY SMALLER THAN A HEAD!@!!!!1!!!!😱) and just let the hand make the pencil scratch out what the eye sees. It’s fun, once you get past tearing your hair out.
I’ve spent the last week and some change trying to sketch individual rocks. My son pointed out that rocks are arbitrary shapes, so you can’t lean nearly so hard into the viewer’s inborn pattern recognition; sketching a rock takes you back to a very basic place of making a lot of exhausting and unsatisfactory decisions about which lines and values and volumes are needed to communicate “rock”—all of which makes going back to something man-made or highly defined (like glasses) feel like a vacation, despite the collection of curves and angles and refractions that had previously bedeviled you.
Hence why I spent two weeks drawing rocks, and you are getting my glasses instead.
Proposal E is on your ballot for the upcoming election (get those ballots in by Tuesday Nov 3!).
I’m gonna vote NO on Prop E.
Here is the entirety of the ballot language:
Creation and Governance of a Municipal Electric Utility Shall Chapter 15 of the Charter be amended to require the City to establish a municipal electric utility and governance structure therefore?
Prop E has nothing to do with the SEU that something like 80% of us supported and is already doing really good work that brings together renewable energy and justice. Bravo!
Prop E is a totally separate parallel effort to buy the crappy power infrastructure we have (poles and lines and transformers and all the other things that blow down every time we have a big wind) from DTE
That requires a massive immediate investment (on the order of $500,000,000 to $1 billion)
That equipment has been neglected for decades (which is why folks are mad enough here to want to start their own power company), so we’d also inherit the maintenance burden on busted down old equipment
That price tag does not include any way to generate power; we’d still need to buy that on the open market. We’d just be buying poles and wires.
The only avenue to pay for this is basically rate increases, so power would get more expensive immediately (in a city already deep into a housing affordability crisis that is forcing out families and shrinking our schools), at a time when people are acutely aware of rising energy costs (data centers, A.I., wars in Europe and the Middle East, etc.)
There is no recent example of a community successfully buying out a local utility company and converting it to a municipal utility. Boulder (a much wealthier community than Ann Arbor—which is by no means economically deprived) tried and failed. The successful municipal utilities here in Michigan were formed in the late 1800–1900s and were the original power companies in those areas; there are only two examples of a community buying out a traditional power company in Michigan, one is Bay City (which was already running its own municipal utility and bought out redundant grid structure) and the other Traverse City—who did so in 1912. Point being: conditions are somewhat different now, and pointing to success in Lansing (Lansing Board of Water & Light, founded 1885) and Holland (Holland Board of Public Works, 1893) are not good priors for us buying ill-maintained second-hand equipment from DTE in 2027 in a city that has no power generation capacity and nowhere to build it.
This roundtable discussion composed almost entirely of environmentalists, activists, and developers with a track record for sustainability and eliminating reliance on fossil fuels helped me understand what I was missing when I looked at this inscrutable wall of text:
Give this a watch and don’t forget to get your ballot in early or show up in-person on Nov 3.
This week was Hair Week. My family preferred the Friday sketch (on the right above)—and they’re right, it was the best hair of the week—but I sorta liked Monday best overall (on the left). It got her expression and vibe right. Also, the glasses were fun. I hadn’t recalled that this was actually my third hair week in the last twelve months. Nice to have the chance to look back and see that, if nothing else, I’ve gotten better at capturing value and volume, not just line.
The recommendation from some website quoted on the news is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car, are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off? And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone when loving everyone is an option.…
