Caption: “Way past his bedtime, a Little Boy stumbles upon a disturbing video on the internet.”
Somehow so much worse than you assume, without being remotely gory or violent or sexual.
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).
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.
You Are Beautiful. Watch this video…
Watch their faces. It’s fascinating how often you can see the cognitive dissonance, the battle of voices triggered in an average human’s head by being told they are beautiful. I don’t think this was the filmmaker’s point—in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the opposite—but it’s kind of heartbreaking. Why the hell should it be so hard to be told you are beautiful?
This video is ten years old. All of these kids are adults now (hopefully). Gott in Himmel how I wish there was a follow-up video of each of them being shown this video.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
Yesterday was Yom Kippur, which means there was a Yizkor service with my congregation, which means I spent much of the day thinking of my father (of blessed memory), who I loved a great deal, despite not necessarily liking him very much.
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
I, on the other hand, preferred this lil Honikmensch, ready to rock you with a big ole honey-smack:
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:
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).
Oh, Nazis! You crazy goofballs!
“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:
