Here’s my son’s note, when I asked for his Sketch-of-the-Week input (every week I send him a picture of the previous week’s spread from my journal, showing that week’s five sketches, and ask for his feedback):
“Gotta be the skull house with the ladder…Something about the perspective gives me the sense that the skull is growing in size, or moving towards the viewer. I don’t know if it’s the best composition [of the week] but it’s the best vibes.”
The reference here is a snapshot of my daughter climbing a ladder into some of the historic cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, plus a lot of public domain pics of old skulls I found on Wikimedia.
Personally, my pick for this week would have been this little girl I saw at the Cross Country Ski Headquarters near Roscommon, MI last weekend. I think of her as “Lil Puffball”:
On reflection, my son is right. I like Lil Puffball not because it’s a great sketch, but because it’s one I had to finish in just a minute or two, because I was working from life, not pics on my phone. Given the constraint, it represents big progress for me, in terms of craft. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun to look at, and I think it’s maybe lower on emotional content (to the viewer) than I’d like. When you look at Lil Puffball, you aren’t feeling what I felt looking at her. But when you look at Skull House, you get what I’m getting at. Also, Skull House is the first time (I think?) that I’ve really tried to bring together disparate reference images in order to really take a stab at fiction in a sketch.
For what it’s worth, it’s is cold as fuck here in Michigan (it was negative when I woke up, and mostly single digits all day), and it’s subzero where my son’s at (he goes to college just about as far into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as you can get). He has to go around in this get up:
…because this is what his campus looks like:
(Yeah, that’s a frozen canal running between two parts of Lake Superior, from when this part of the state was mostly only good for Copper and lumber.)