I spent last week hiking Isle Royale with my family, and so it was “landscape week” in my journal. Under normal circumstances, you likely wouldn’t be seeing a “sketch-of-the-week” from me following such an endeavor, because almost all of my attempts at landscape thus far have been horrid. But on the second day of the trip I was sitting on the concrete dock at the Moskey Basin campground with my son. He glanced at my sketch in progress, then up at the subject, and joked “Oh! So those two trees are the protagonists?”
And with that joke it clicked: just as I struggled with figures before I pinned down that I needed to start with a single line capturing the gesture, I was struggling with landscape because I needed to start by determining what element (for me) was the “protagonist” in the scene.
I ended up basically happy with all of the sketches from landscape week, but my son felt that this one of the brave little pines at the very edge of Moskey Basin was the best overall:
Last week was “horse and rider” week in Dave’s journal. Each day was a timed sketch (from 5 to 12 minutes), and I was pretty pleased with all of them. Setting a timer has proven to be a potent tool for helping me know when to take the drawing away.
My son loved all of these, but his favorite was this “anguished lancer”—the shortest sketch of the bunch. What’s on this paper took just five minutes to sketch, after seven minutes spent attempting and adjusting and trying again, only to erase every mark I’d made and start over from scratch. Probably I should categorize this as a 12-minute sketch, as the undrawn horses I erased were as important to the final result as the one I left on the paper.
For my part, I think my favorite was the 12-minute “bronco rider,” which was my son’s second fave. He really liked the shading and line weight, and how these gave the horse weight and volume on the page. I just really liked the horse’s gesture:
All of the horse sketches were drawn during coffee breaks last week. Twelve minutes is a pretty good amount of time for a coffee break.
All of last week was Mushroom Week. The first sketch was from life, while canoeing in Voyageur National Park. The rest were from photos I took while hiking there. They’re all either edible painted suillus mushrooms or hallucinogenic amanita muscaria—and a good thing we didn’t need to rely on my identifications, as the grouping in the second sketch is undeniably the edible painted suillus, although I mis-IDed them at the time as amanitas.
Mushrooms are fun to sketch, sort of halfway between people and architecture: they have more gesture than buildings, but more structure than people, with less nit-picky line detail overall. Sort of like sketching a medium-chill, politely attentive cottage, or a fortress tower waiting for its carry-out to be ready.
You’ll note times on these. Something that came out of the no-post weeks of working on gesture drawings and faces was a greater attention to how much time I’m spending, and right sizing that effort, so I can confidently jump into a sketch even when I have a limited block of time to work, knowing I’ll be able to get something satisfactory down. All of these took 10 to 20 minutes.
My wife and I spent last week canoeing in the backcountry along the Minnesotan-Canada border in Voyageurs National Park, which is noted as being among the nation’s least visited parks—an extremely attractive feature if, like me, your favorite quality of the National Park system is the opportunities it presents for spending a week never getting closer than several hundred feet to a stranger (and that only across a body of leech infested water).
Along with solitude and no cell coverage, this trip afforded an opportunity to work on landscapes and natural still life, both of which I’ve largely neglected recently (I spent my sketching time over the last very hectic month focusing on timed gesture exercises).
Here’s my son’s pick for the Sketch of the Week. He especially liked the “gesture of the shoreline,” and the rendering of light and shadow in the pines and on the water along the shore:
This was the far shore across from our campsite on Loiten Lake, which was the furthest back we went on our trip (the second day, during which we canoed across three lakes and did three portages, schlepping indestructible aluminum National Park canoes through ankle-deep mud, mosquito-blessed pine forest, and over rocky hills).
That treeline was lovely, because of how it changed with every moment of the shifting light. It brought to mind my favorite Impressionist work, which wasn’t even a work, but rather an exercise in self-torture: Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series. I don’t really like Impressionism, or Europe, or Frenchmen, or Cathedrals, but I’ve loved those painted sketches since I first saw them in college, at maybe 18-years-old, because I love what they say about shadow and light—all of which is to say that I may dislike Impressionists, but I’m deeply touched by what they are grappling with, and eager to grapple with it as well (albeit on my terms, you cheese eating surrender monkeys!)
BONUS: The title of this blog post is a reference to this traditional tune:
My son voted for this god as the sketch of the week, primarily because he really liked how the reflections came out on the water. There’s actually a lot I dislike about this sketch (the major one being that the gesture is wrong: her body is too stuff and vertical, and doesn’t capture the motion I wanted to imply. I wasn’t trying to draw a god idly gazing at the horizon; I wanted to show one treading off to capture it).
But as I’ve said before, powerful naked women are a crowd-pleaser, and so they lead when I’ve got ’em. Besides, I really am pleased with that reflection, and with my first attempt at a diaphanous cloth.
The runner-up is this bar of soap, and probably the better sketch:
I write for a living, have terrible penmanship, and struggle mightily to “unsee” text as text: when I draw something with a prominent hunk of text in it, it’s devilishly hard for me to drawwhat that text lookslike instead ofwriting what it says. I’m working on that, and this is the first attempt that got anywhere close to right.
This was another split decision sketch week. I was actually mostly happy with every sketch this week (which is extremely rare) but also felt that each of them had unresolved issues, either with legibility or just minor composition decisions early in the sketch that ended up creating headaches.
At any rate, my son felt that these two were the best showing.
He really liked how the hands loomed out of the gloom, and the overall gesture in the second sketch. I really liked working on the first (the extremely foreshortened hands were both challenging but super engaging to work on) and the second is, as discussed in the past, an indisputable crowd-pleaser (saucy powerful ladies garner second glances and clicks—although, that aside, capturing the depth of the way she is sitting and the angled and occluded way the axe-hand-arm interact was really pleasingly challenging).
Final note: For ladies and gent of a certain age, the title of this post will trigger a potentially catastrophic earworm. To the rest of you, I offer a mostly forgotten one-hit wonder of my Cold War youth, the presumably ironically (???) named Georgia Satellites.
This was another week of sketches more about shading and volume than form. My son slightly preferred this first sketch (the model was wearing crazy long-fingered claw-gloves):
But he also really liked this water bottle sketch:
I recognize that the top sketch is more compelling (scantily clad women in powerful poses are a crowd-pleaser!) but the bottle was a bigger victory. The “Flex” sketch was from a two-dimensional image on my phone; I sketch that way a lot, and have gotten accustomed to translating two dimensions of pixels into two dimensions of graphite on wood pulp. The water bottle was just sitting on the table IRL. When you are sharing actual real space and time with an object, it’s much harder to fight the brain’s need to tell stories about what the “actual” shapes are, and instead let the eye tell the hand what it sees where.
My son was extremely emphatic that this was the sketch of the week, despite it being a week of many good sketches for me:
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:
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:
He also liked the rightsized detailing on the “Herald of the Odd God” and the gesture of the man she struck down:
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.
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:
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.
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. 🤷♀️
