Category: SketchOfTheWeek

In the Dark is the Dark (Sketches of the Week for Week 43 of 2025)

Week 43 was “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.” Deep shadows are fun, because the visual and emotional impact is often inversely proportional to the effort. This is definitely a realm where knowing when to take the drawing away from yourself pays off.

My son thought this was the sketch of the week: “I like the way middle right seems to lean in a little. Makes it look the spookiest.”

A pencil sketch of a young woman looming out of the darkness.

I sorta preferred this one from earlier in the week:

A pencil sketch of a bearded man lit from above with hard shadows that make him look like a floating skull.

This sketch was the hardest—in that I erased everything and started over several times—and the easiest, once I stopped listening to a brain that was telling me “this is an eye! this is a nose! those are lips, you idiot!” and just put black where I saw black. I sorta love how the lighting make so clear that there’s a skull under that skin and meat. If anything, my failure here is that I didn’t go for blacker blacks.

If you can turn off your brain and just let your eye tell your hand where the black goes, hardshadowed, dramatic chiaroscuro actually almost makes for the easiest sketches.

Sketching glitches (Sketch of the Week for Week 42 of 2025)

No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them 🤷‍♀️

This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an older man in a tie.

A "glitched" pencil sketch of an autumn tree.

I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.

The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.

Tree and Bench [NOT PICTURED: all of humanity] (Sketch of the Week for Week 40 of 2025)

Week 40 was “Tree Week” in my journal, where I worked on capturing more different kinds of trees under different lighting conditions. It didn’t go superterrific, but my son liked this one because the overall composition communicated the scale nicely, and it captured something of the late-day autumn light in Michigan, which has an oddly specific angle and saturation.

A pencil sketch of a tree near a bench and pathway, caught in the deep slanting light of late-day Michigan autumn.

I’m sharing it not because it’s especially good, but just because it puts me in the mind of Edward Hopper, who I think captured the unique (and uniquely enduring) dimensions of American Loneliness better than any other artist who has yet lived.

My glass is neither half full nor half empty… (Sketch of the Week for Week 39 of 2025)

… because it isn’t a glass of water; it’s just a sketch. But I like how I began to capture the light here. I didn’t get it right, but I got closer than I think I’ve gotten on any sketch before, and I really do love light and shadow and refraction.

A pencil sketch of a glass of water, half full

That said, I did a terrible job of capturing “glass” in this glass. Here’s one of my father’s finished drawings on a similar theme (though no water; his glass was entirely empty. Let that be a lesson to you.)

A finished drawing of an empty drinking glass by David Robert Nelson (z"l)

I’ve always loved this drawing, how precise and controlled it is, how it makes a flat white page into a space one can occupy. I suppose there’s a lesson there, too: the hours upon hours spent making a small orderly corner of the world where every lines makes sense and can be justified and defended, and the whole thing can be secured in a frame unchanging, so you can keep looking back at it and knowing it is there exactly as it should be.

Tiny Dancers (Sketches of the Week for Week 38 of 2025)

I mostly sketch from photographs, simply as a practical matter (I mostly work from home, and am mostly in a college town in mid-Michigan; nit a lot of horses and barbarian ladies sitting around my kitchen waiting to be models). But this gets me thinking a lot about how high-speed photography has changed drawing and painting, not by replacing them—the perennial anxiety about art and technology—but by giving the artist one more tool to see more clearly in ever smaller increments. At my most hopeful, I wonder about the ways genAI will offer creatives sharper scalpels and finer microscopes. (And at my least hopeful? There, I’m pretty hopeless.)

Anyway, last week was all “furious dancers,” a subject that is devilishly tricky to capture from life if you haven’t first had the benefit of capturing it from a snapshot.

A pencil sketch of Fred Astaire mid-leap

This lady in the flowing skirt was my son’s favorite from last week. He insists it’s legible, but I worry; her posture is so striking and strange. Either way, it is indeed a good sketch, in that it captured what I hoped to capture. I just wonder if I maybe chose the wrong subject to begin with.

A pencil sketch of a whirling flamenco dancer

I think this one was my favorite. Draped cloth is a fun challenge in restraint, and I think both the dynamism of her gesture and its dignity and grace all came through. 10 of 10, A++; would draw again.

A pencil sketcher of a lyric ballerina, her reach exceeding her grasp

L’Shana Tova, mofos! (Sketches of the Week for Week 37 of 2025)

Rosh Hashanah is fast approaching, so last week’s sketches were all High Holiday themed, as that’s what’s in my head right now.

My son felt strongly that this lil Jew rocking out on an apple was the best sketch of the week; he loved those groovy arms:

A tiny chasidic Jew rocking out in a big ole apple

I, on the other hand, preferred this lil Honikmensch, ready to rock you with a big ole honey-smack:

A tiny chasidic Jew wielding a big, loaded honey-jar dipper

Meanwhile, my daughter (who just her her her bat mitzvah this past summer) felt strongly that this mighty little fella was the sketch of the week:

Tiny little chasidic Jew about to throw a big ole apple at you, mofo!

One way or the other, may your coming year be good and sweet 🍏🍎🍯 (regardless of whether or not you observe; all you goyim deserve good years just as much as anyone else).

“So those two trees are the protagonists?” (Sketch of the Week for Week 34 of 2025)

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:

A pencil sketch of pines growing along the stone shores of Moskey Basin in Isle Royale National Park, MI

“And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death…” (Rev 6:8) (Sketches of the Week for Week 32 of 2025)

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.

Pencil sketch of a lancer on a rearing steed.

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:

Pencil sketch of a bronco rider

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.

Mushrooms have a lot of character 🍄 🍄‍🟫 (Sketches of the Week for Week 30 of 2025)

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.

Sketch of a perfect little painted suillus mushroom

A sketch of a group of painted suillus mushrooms, which I mislabeled as being Fly Agarics (aka amanitas)

Pencil sketch of a small amanita mushoom

Pencil sketch of a pair of amanita mushooms

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t never shine ♬♫♪ (Sketch of the Week for Week 29 of 2025)

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:

A pencil sketch of the pine-crowded shoreline of Loiten Lake in Voyageurs National Park

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: