Category: SketchOfTheWeek

Oy! These fucking guys?! (Sketches of the Week for Week 35 of 2026)

After several fruitless weeks of driving myself mad experimenting with cross-hatching in India ink, I took a break last week to go back to portraits. It was a huge relief to go back to something I’m used to botching, as opposed to botching new things that you’d erroneously thought would be easy-peasy.

For Week 35 I focused exclusively on “Big Crazy Energy” reference photos. My son loved Mr. Mustacheollio (top, #duh), but I was sorta taken with the final sketch of the week (bottom), which you may be shocked to learn was based on an old black-and-white photo of a young Rodney Dangerfield.

All week I got terrible likenesses, but felt like I captured the energy—and sorta realized that although I’d feel more competent if I could get a decent likeness that folks would look at and say “Hey! That’s Whoever-You-Were-Actually-Trying-to-Sketch!”, it’s the energy that I’m really after. Maybe it’s better to get the energy right anyway. I mean, no matter you hard you try and how good you get, this will never be a pipe, right?

“if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (Sketch of the Week for Week 34 of 2026)

My wife and kids and I spent last week camping and hiking in Acadia National Park, where I snapped the above pic. My son and I both ended up using it as a reference for different drawings. My sketch is the first shown below, his drawing the second.

I guess what really struck me was how closely we both captured the posture and framing, despite working entirely independently and in different media with different techniques. I know that shouldn’t be surprising—we were working from the exact same reference image—but somehow it was.

Anyway, he headed back to college yesterday, and I’m missing him this morning.

If you ever want to visit Acadia, a word of advice: the park is cut into several pieces. The most famous one is right next to Bar Harbor. The hiking is very nice, but the driving and parking and single sand beach (and Bar Harbor itself) are all sorta nuts crowded. The other major chunk is on the Schoodic Peninsula. That’s just a few miles across the bay, but an +1hr drive. The campgrounds over there are quiet and absurdly dark and misty and austerely beautiful. It was lobster season, and on the advice of the border guard (we came in via Quebec), you can get a lobster roll at the grocery store for $9.99 (a summertime Maine staple that will put you back $25 in Bar Harbor).

On the way to Acadia you’ll pass through Bangor, where Stephen King’s longtime home still stands:

Feral Flowers (Sketches of the Week for Week 31 of 2026)

Three sketches of flowers done in graphite and watercolor pencil. Each flower has been made to look more feral. The top is wild sweet pea flowers, the middle is a a hops leaf, and the bottom is an attacking lily

The title sorta says it all: much like the last couple weeks of clownification were about sketching portraits and then clownifying them, this was sketching plants and then emphasizing how damn threatening many plants look.

I’m not gonna say I’m super happy with any of these—my journal paper is a god-awful medium for watercolor, among other issues—but it was nice to go back to experimenting with other media after several years focused almost exclusively on sketching in pencil with a little ink thrown in.

Also, I like the vibe with the lily at the bottom. A lily is a hella scary flower, when you really give it a good look.

Further clownification (Sketch of the Week for Week 30 of 2026)

A "clownified" sketch of a young woman.

One of the benefits of clownification is that it helps me chill out about trying to sketch attractive people. When I go to sketch someone who is actually good looking, I generally make myself miserable worrying that it will turn out grotesque, and thus guarantee it turns out absolutely grotesque. Meanwhile, if I go into a sketch knowing I’m just going to paint on grotesquery, it’s a lot easier to chill out about the base sketch, and end up with a suitable approximation of a normally attractive human.

My son liked the above clown because it was the clearest and most legible at a glance. I preferred this one, as it most competently combined the vibe of the reference photo and the Das Unheimliche of the clownification:

A pencil sketch of a cute girl, clownified.

Meanwhile, my daughter requested I do a sketch of our dog Schnitzel:

Sketch of a schnauzer, clownified.

I like that he brings a certain gravity to his role of clown and light-bringer to these benighted and uncertain times.

clownification i (Sketch of the Week for Week 29 of 2026)

pencil sketch of a terrified and appalled young woman, but she's also a clown

Long story, but I got a notion into my head to start taking a stab (ha!) at “clownification” this week: picking a normal reference photo, sketching it “straight” for 5 to 10 minutes, and then taking the next 5 to 10 minutes to “clownify” it. This is an admittedly weird as hell thing to do, but I’m gonna suggest it as an exercise: There is something about drawing what you see, and then adding to it things that you don’t see but know how they would look applied to that form, which really helps you improve your sense of the contours of the underlying model and how it all pieces together.

BONUS CLOWN: My son really liked the “vibes” on this sketch:

A sketch of Willem Dafoe, clownified.

I sorta felt like it was cheating, as the initial reference pic was of Willem Dafoe and was already hella creepy with no further effort from me:

Photo of Willem Dafoe looking the creepy.

Clouds and Tower; Hand and Eye; Stone and Surf (Sketches of the Week for Week 28 of 2026)

We’re caught downwind of forest fires in the Upper Midwest and Canada, and thus experiencing some of the worst air quality on earth (literally) here in Ann Arbor right now. The smoke is at ground level, where it shifts like fog. Everything smells like someone is BBQing over a dumpster fire, and the sun looks like a searing, distant bike-reflector at the back of a shed occupied by a chain-smoking blacksmith. Walking outside for more than 15 minutes, even in a respirator, gives you a headache and your eyes itch.

Last week I was kayaking around the Apostle Islands, which was dangerous and terrifying in its own special way, but way better than this. So I’m thinking about that. The above sketches are from that trip, as are the below pics.

FYI: in this last picture, that’s fog, not smoke—which was still terrifying, because we were in kayaks, and Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world, and you can get hypothermia from falling in it in the summer, but still not so bad as this garbage air that has me and the dogs trapped indoors.

I’m a frayed knot (Sketch of the Week for Week 25 of 2026)

A pencil sketch of a figure made of a knotted hair tie. The lil guy looks like he's straight-jacketed, standing on a desolate plain

Last week was all sketches of knotted string, which were largely boring, and so steadily edged their way into being compositionally surreal. I wasn’t going to post this week, but this lil guy kept striking me with how poignant he was, trapped and bound on a desolate plain. I’m sure this means nothing. Carry on.

See also:

A string walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, we don’t serve strings in here!” So he goes back out, loops his neck into itself, musses up his hair and goes back in. The bartender says, “Hey, aren’t you that string I just kicked out of here?” The string says, “No, I’m a frayed knot!”

[old joke; source of this version]

A Regal Bird (Sketch of the Week for Week 23 of 2026)

A pencil sketch of Henry the 8th, if he'd been an American blue jay instead of a fat British dude.

It was another week focused on fanciful compositions, this time fixated on blue jays (there is one haunting my backyard, where I’m increasingly working now that Michigan is favoring high-heat/high-humidity days. Also, I finally finished patching my fence and mounting gates, thus making the yard safe for the dogs to wander and amuse themselves rather than kvetch at me all afternoon because they are bored and disagreeable).

Anyway, this sketch started in this direction because I had a reference photo of a blue jay that made the lil fella look quite regal and blue jays naturally have a Henry the 8th chin-beard. But I ended up liking it because the royal bird wound up looking sorta shell-shocked, like the enormity of his power and responsibility had just dawned on him.