Author: dave-o

Knowing when to take the drawing away (Sketch of the Week for Week 21 of 2025)

My son was extremely emphatic that this was the sketch of the week, despite it being a week of many good sketches for me:

Pencil sketch of a Latina woman with a thick braid staring down the viewer.

The reference is another still from a horror movie (frustratingly, I cannot recall what film; I think it was a short indie film, but can’t even—Oy! I just remembered! It’s The Blue Drum!) The film wasn’t much to shout about, in terms of story, but I liked it visually; it was understated and made good use of light and framing.

At any rate, my son really liked the shadows and shading and the way that (with his help) I captured how piercing the actress’ eyes are in the particular still frame. As we chatted, it seemed to me what he liked about this sketch was the restraint: it put on the page what needed to be there to capture the mood and her strength, and left off the page what wasn’t part of that. Thinking this one over—and continuing to sketch this week—I was reminded of a bit in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. If you’ve never read it or seen it, the film with Will Smith is a very faithful adaptation, and worth your time. There’s also an audio drama (or maybe a stage recording?) of it floating around out there, with Alan Alda as Flan, which is great.

At any rate, there’s a point where Flan—an art dealer and collector, passionate about art but no artists himself—recalls his kids having this amazing art teacher in grade school:

                FLAN
          Why are all your students geniuses in the second
          grade? Look at the first grade. Blotches of
          green and black. Look at third grade.
          Camouflage. But the second grade --your grade.
          Matisses everyone. You've made my child a
          Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into
          the second grade! What is your secret?

                         THE TEACHER
          Secret? I don't have any secret. I just know
          when to take their drawings away from them.

So, that’s what I guess I’m trying to learn now: when to take my drawings away from myself.

As an aside, if I’d been left to my own devices to pick a sketch of the week, I would have chosen this one. Yes, it’s also one that I took away from myself at the rate time (or nearly so), but that isn’t why I’d pick it. I like it because it felt the best working on it, flowed the most naturally and painlessly from pencil to paper. That’s no measure of art or craft, but it left me inordinately fond of this sketvh, because I so enjoyed the process of becoming with it:

A pencil sketch of a shrouded woman gracefully receeding.

Cloak, dagger, sword, sorcery (Sketches of the Week for Week 20 of 2025)

My son is into D&D and Magic and martial arts, so he sorta loved all of the sketches from this past week, which was all fantasy topics. He thought “Cloaked” was the standout, because the shadows gave it the best depth:

A pencil sketch of a cloaked figure crouched on a box.

He also liked the rightsized detailing on the “Herald of the Odd God” and the gesture of the man she struck down:

A pencil sketch of a robed female priestess She is dear-skull-headed, but otherwise nude, carrying a long staff as she strides toward the viewer.
Pencil sketch of a man kneeling on the ground, struck down by the staff wielded by the robbed priestess in the earlier sketch.

I also liked how this shaman wailing for her demon lover came out. The technique isn’t great—she almost drifts into Ninja Turtle territory, for godsake—but it’s really legible: It catches the eye from a distance, is easy to immediately read, and worth giving a second look. Honestly, should I really be asking for more? It’s sorta like last week’s deep sea diver: a reminder that composition and technique and artistry aren’t the goal on their own, but at the service of catching someone’s eye and making it worth looking twice.

Throwing shade (Sketches of the Week for Week 19 of 2025)

I’ve been thinking more and more about shade and tone and value, and how much more important to form these are than line is. I have pretty crummy distance vision, so just taking off my glass is a quick reminder: most of the time, I mostly cannot see lines at any meaningful distance. Instead, my brain intuits form by assessing tonal values.

So, the big project right now is turning that whole processing system off in my head, so the hand can just draw the layers of darkness the eye sees, without the stupid brain telling me what’s round and where a corner comes together at 90 degrees. Yeah, that lip is round in real life, but it is flat on paper and just grading from deep black to untouched; that beam’s corner where it meats the joist is 90º on my porch, but is waaaaaay closer to 140º on the paper; the same shadow is way darker on the interior face of the beam than it is on the side.

Anyway, my son opined that “Bit Lip” was the best sketch of the week, so I’m posting that here:

Pencil sketch of a close-up of a woman's mouth; she's biting the corner of her lower lip.

But I think I was more pleased with “Porch Detail”; I’ve struggled mightily to “unsee” 90º angles in architecture, and I think I finally got there on this sketch.

That said, my boy is right: the lips are a more compelling picture overall, even if technically rougher.

Pencil sketch of the detail of a timber supporting beam holding up a joist supporting a section of overhanging porch roof.

Meanwhile, I’m tossing this guy in as a bonus, because he’s proven sort of a mystery: it’s a failed sketch, to me, totally missing what I was trying to capture, and pretty technically sloppy. But everyone who glances him in my journal asks about him. There’s something about him that is speaking to people along a wavelength I cannot detect. 🤷‍♀️

Pencil sketch of a seated man in a full Victorian diving suit

To be clear: I am in no way suggesting that IKEA may pose an existential threat to the fabric of reality

My latest horror story, “The Nölmyna,” is now officially published and free to read on Reactor: https://reactormag.com/the-nolmyra-david-erik-nelson/

A few months back I hung out with Ann VanderMeer, who edited this story for Reactor, at a conference in Florida. We ended up talking about Grady Hendrix, and I mentioned that this story sort of arose out of my frustration with Hendrix’s first book, Horrorstör. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with that book—which I really liked—just that it wasn’t the story I would have written about IKEA. This one is. 

I’ve spoken before about how much of my writing (and, I believe, much of art in general) arises from frustration that some artist Isn’t Doing It Right, Dammit!™. That’s certainly the case here: I wrote “The Nölmyna,” in part, because Hendrix hadn’t Done It Right, Dammit!™, and so I’d better just jump in and take care of that.

But it wasn’t until this morning that it dawned on me how deeply unreasonable it was for me to pick up Horrorstör and expect it to be the story I expected, because I have deeply weird feelings about IKEA that are simply not the norm:

Almost 20 years ago I was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia. This is well managed now, but I continue to struggle with certain public spaces, especially those like IKEA: cavernous places that have poor sight lines, lots of people, no windows, and obtuse wayfinding. I can function in these places, but I experience dissociation and depersonalization, intrusive thoughts, a free-floating dread, and pretty much would rather be anyone or anyplace else. If you’ve ever been too stoned on too much edibles, you’re in the ballpark. 

IKEA is the seat of cosmic horror for me. This morning it dawned on me that maybe other people don’t experience this. Like, when I say “I hate IKEA,” what I mean is “When I’m in IKEA, I often feel like it would be better to stop breathing and being alive anymore.” I’m beginning to suspect when other people say “I hate IKEA,” they just mean “it’s crowded and weirdly stuffy” or “that furniture only holds up half the time” or “my partner and I always get in arguments there about lamps.”

Anyway, the publisher’s legal team very nicely asked me not to call the store “IKEA” in this story. But it’s IKEA. This story is about the true nature of IKEA and the distinct possibility that, through no fault of their own, they are creating the conditions for the absorptive annihilation of All of Everything by an Eminent and Imminent Immanence.  You’ve been warned.

The girls ain’t all right… (Sketch of the Week for Week 18 of 2025)

My son and I once again were of differing opinions. I thought the best sketch from last week was this one:

A pencil sketch of a woman sitting on the floor, defeated, head hung low and hair obscuring her face, hands planted on knees.

He agreed that it was good technique overall, and he liked the gesture. But nonetheless, he thought this one was the best sketch of the week:

A pencil sketch of a woman on the floor, reaching up toward the viewer as that viewer recedes up and away.

I argued that nailing the foreshortening put this over the top, even if it is overall looser and more dashed off. No doubt, foreshortening is devilishly hard: You sort of have to turn off your brain entirely and just let your eye thoughtlessly control your hand to even get remotely close to getting it right. As such, even if the “technique,” broadly speaking, is better in the top sketch, it’s also true that the top sketch is very much an analytical exercise, one where I spent a lot of time layering up graphite in order to make this posture legible at a glance. As such, I didn’t just think about it; I vastly overthought about it, arguing with myself, breaking down what shapes were where and why. Meanwhile, my “technique” was fundamentally stronger with the bottom sketch, in that it was drawn with almost no intellectual engagement or justification or analysis, just my eye guiding my hand, setting down what it saw. Simple recording, without analysis, is at the heart of the exercise.

I dunno. I still feel “Defeat” is the better sketch—or, at least, it captures the current moment better, and that’s what it’s all about.

Our reach exceeds our grasp (Sketch of the Week for Week 17 of 2025)

Folks often complain about drawing hands—hands are hard! And they are 100% right: Hands are hard to draw. The one unalloyed good that has come from the advent of generative AI is that it’s objectively confirmed that hands are really hard to get right: we used supercomputers to capture, encode, digest, and average all human art ever, and even it consistently fucks up the hands. That is some poignant shit right there.

But hands are sort of awesome models. I’ve probably drawn more left hands than anything else in my life, because I’m right handed, which means there is one model I always have with me that can adopt as wide a range of poses as the entire human body. If you want to sketch and improve at sketching, your hand is an amazing model.

Anyway, even with decades of drawing hands, they’re still hard. A lot went wrong with this sketch as I worked it, but it ended up in the right place: it captures, to my satisfaction, something ineffable I was feeling about the human condition, and it does so in three square inches of pressed wood pulp and graphite, in a way that you can either grasp or ignore at a single glance.

A pencil sketch of a left hand reaching up out of the gloom.

♬♫♪ This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on our sun…♬♫♪ (Sketches of the Week for Week 16 of 2025)

Another week where Sketch of the Week was disputed; my son felt strongly that the lower sketch of the sunrise through a just-budding cherry tree, was the stronger work technically, in that it captured something about the way light behaves in that situation that he found delicious. I preferred the windswept old man, because of the way he teeters between sinister and good-humored in the same why the open eye from Week 14 vacillates between terrified and enraged.

A pair of pencil sketches. The upper sketch shows an wiry old bald man with an enormous beard. He's depicted from the chest up, and seems to be somewhat windswept. The lower sketch shows a cherry tree just in blossom as the sun rises behind it, throwing it into sharp contrast.

This might be an extremely important short story to read right now

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.

As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.

Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”—or using aesthetics to predict the future

Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.

Cover art for William Gibson's short story collection BURNING CHROME. Shows a pixelated blue/grey hued bust of a human figure.

Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I’d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson’s The Grifters more than Dashiel Hammett’s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn’t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I’m not sure he’d argue with me on that; he’s said himself that although he’d been writing “stories” since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was ”Burning Chrome” (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer).

Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally—as with “The Gernsback Continuum”, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).

I’m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback/1950’s “Populuxe“/Frank Frazetta/“Googie”/Eero Saarinen were to him. I think it’s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped—or feared—we’d soon see on French cave walls.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

The bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages

Before this year, I had no clue The Power or Naomi Alderman existed—despite the acclaim the book met when it was published in 2016, and the fact that its apparently been made into an Amazon mini-series starring Toni Collette, who I absolutely love. A colleague in a crit group read a story I was working on, and recommended I read this. She was absolutely right.

Cover are for the near-future scifi dystopia novel THE POWER by Naomi Alderman shows red hand print overlayed with a winding root-like/lightning-0like pattern in grey.

When I say this is the bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages, I’m not exaggerating. I actually had to stop about 10 minutes from the end because I was in a Thai restaurant in Orlando and was on the verge of bursting into tears, and didn’t want everyone staring at me. This book is easily better, and darker, than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (both a book and artist I hold in hella high regard).

One clarification: when I told my wife that this book was the bravest and most horrifying thing I’d read in years, she totally misunderstood what I found horrifying in the book. She assumed I was upset by the rapes. There are several very graphic and traumatic rapes of men by women in this novel, as well as broader sexual subjugation of men.

Frankly, none of that really bothered me. I’ve read fictional depictions and non-fictional accounts of the rapes of men and boys that I’ve found more upsetting. Talk to anyone who’s worked for child protective services and you’ll hear an earful. Humans are, on balance, awfully creative when it comes to being awful.

What got me about this book is that, evidently and despite it all, there was some small part of me that had continued to really and deeply believe that “everything would be better if women were in charge.” Alderman meticulously dismembered and violated that foolish, optimistic child that was still hiding inside me.