My son and I once again were of differing opinions. I thought the best sketch from last week was this one:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Last week I started thinking about how facial features are inherently disturbing when they are looming out of the gloom or otherwise decontextualized. Hence these sketches.
I was especially pleased with the eye, and how from moment to moment you can’t quite land on whether it is terrified or enraged. I’m inclined to think “both,” that there is a situation in the dark where you are peeling open your eye—or someone is doing it for you—and you yourself cannot reliably determine if you feel terrified or enraged, or both and in what proportions. If I were to title that sketch as a standalone piece of art, it would be “Reading the Newspaper at the End of the Day in 2025.”
All of this was inspired by this sculpture by Hirotoshi Ito:
Feel free to google him. There’s more Ito where that come from.
Sorry again for the long break; I was sick, and then I was at a conference in Florida, and then I was on vacation in Michigan’s UP, and now I’m back.
My son was emphatic that this was the sketch of the week, because he liked the composition and the implied narrative and the fact that there was dialogue:
I’m not so sure. From a technical standpoint, I think this sketch of a single stone on a Lake Superior beach just outside Porcupine Mountain Wilderness Area is the better sketch:
I have the grit on the sand all wrong (I got sloppy, and the technique was no good to begin with) but I feel like I got the depth of the shadow right for maybe the first time ever.
Anyway, it’s not really my call which is “best”; that’s for you. I get what I get out of them in the drawing, and in sharing them with my son.
I didn’t post a sketch last week because 1) I was absurdly sick with influenza A and 2) wasn’t really happy with anything I drew that week. I’m less sick this week, and more satisfied with my work. My son voted for this sketch:
The reference image here is a sample from a reference image pack I found online. I originally took a run at it specifically because I figured it would be basically impossible for me to capture: the cloth’s draping was so complex, and my eyes really had trouble following it. I couldn’t conceive of how I’d communicate a figure I could hardly see.
In the end, this was a super revealing exercise for me: having all those familiar landmarks (eyes, ears, shoulders, hips) gone forced me to simply do the thing I’m always trying to do, and failing at: to look at the subject and draw what I’m seeing, and the feeling of seeing it, not my ideas of what a woman (or whatever) looks like, and what it takes to show one to someone on paper.
I’d thought it would be maddeningly frustrating, but it ended up being super relaxing. 🤷♀️
My son insisted that every sketch from last week had a claim on Sketch of the Week. While I wouldn’t go as far as him, I’m not gonna lie: I was really pleased with this batch, esp. Monday (“Warrior”), Thursday (“Shadow Dancer”), and Friday (“The Terror of Jim Carrey”)
Monday: “Warrior”—This is based on a photo I found on Pinterest, a platform that I’m embarrassed to admit I’m really liking, as it’s proving to be a really good source of reference images. I love the strength of that pose! There’s a lot I failed to capture here—the original model is quite muscular, while mine is almost gaunt; the original pose has this nearly bone crushing hauteur, and mine is almost contemplative—but I was really pleased with the strength in her stance, and I captured that. She feels unmovable, like a dolmen. This is definitely the best all around drawing from the week, according to my son, who really liked the values and shadow shading.
Tuesday: “Swordsman”—Another Pinterest find. My son really loved the dynamism of the pose and the economic capturing of the back muscles. I went after it because I found the pose both interesting, but challenging to make legible.
Wednesday: “The Ahmeek Stamp Mill Ruins”—This is a real place near where my son goes to university. The reference was a photo I took when we were visiting him a couple weeks back, and the ruins were buried in about four feet of snow. He really loved the subject matter, and thought I captured it well. I disagree, but it’s such a mind-bendingly weird place, I’m pleased I did as well as I did. I’m planning to take another stab at it in a larger format, and hopefully with watercolor.
Thursday: “Shadow Dancer”—A benefit of Pinterest is that it’s sent me in new directions looking for reference photos. It had not dawned on my before to look for dancers, but Pinterest is full of photos of them from all sorts of sources, and dancers strike some incredible and gnarly poses; such great monster and eldritch being fodder! This one is more abstract and less eldritch, but I loved what her shadow was doing on the wall.
Friday: “The Terror of Jim Carrey”—I modeled this off of a relatively famous set of pics of Jim Carrey. It’s not a good drawing of Jim Carrey, and it isn’t even really a good drawing of the actual gesture he’s making, which is a sort of mugging cartoonish surprise. But jesus!, what I got on the page was arresting; it captures legitimate terror for me in a way I’m having trouble articulating. I find that tiny scribble so goddamned disturbing, I’m fascinated.
We had a long weekend last week, and so drove up to visit my son at college and do some cross-country skiing. He goes to Michigan Tech University, which is in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s not just in the Upper Peninsula; it’s in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the northern most bit of this northern most bit of Michigan. Most folks have no idea how absurdly far from basically anything this is, and how off the beaten path basically the entire UP is. It’s a 10 to 12 hour drive from our house to his dorm. You can drive to Washington, DC quicker. Houghton is north of the 45th parallel and west of Chicago. Everyone there are Packers fans and, despite it being the birthplace of pro hockey, you basically so no Red Wings gear. It’s all pine trees, and they still have logging there. The mountains in the UP are some of the oldest in the world, clocking in at 2 billion years–making them older than the idea of trees. My kid goes from class to class kitted out like he’s in Mad Max: Beyond Snow Globe—not because he’s got an innate sartorial flare, but just as a practical matter. It’s not just absurd that this is part of Michigan; it feels sort of absurd that it’s part of this timestream.
As near as I can tell, the Keweenaw has been in a state of “Winter Weather Advisory” since late November. There are feet and feet of snow. It was snowing basically the entire time we were there, mostly sideways. Plows ran at all hours, and people were sort of perpetually shoveling. Once you were out of the town of Houghton (where the college is), it’s clearly a constant battle to keep roads passable and maintain at least one functional entrance to your house.
We were staying in a little town north of Houghton called “Lake Linden.” I have no clue why the town is called that, since the lake that it’s on the edge of is Torch Lake. We rented a Vrbo apartment that was in a brick building built in the late 1800s whose ground floor tenant was an ACE hardware, one of the town’s four or five clearly functional businesses. The Vrbo had 15-foot ceilings with 12-foot-tall windows, slept eight, allowed dogs, and cost us I think around $70 per night. If we’d stayed in Houghton we’d have paid $200 per night for a single room in a Super 8, and couldn’t have had the dogs with us. If we’d staid any further north, I think we’d still be there, forced into cannibalism or binge watching all of Bluey.
This sketch is the detail of the entrance to the neighboring building. It was built around the same time as the building we were in, but was of uncertain status. The side of it said “Dave’s Home Improvement Center” but neither of the two existing store fronts appeared to be going concerns, let alone dedicated to home improvement. One entryway had been renovated, with modern glazing and frames. The other was absolutely ancient painted steel and wood. Some of the brickabrack inside implied that maybe there was occasionally a farmer’s market held there, but none of that had happened recently. There was a ton of cilantro growing in trays, leggy and too tall, collapsing under its own weight.
The architecture in the Keweenaw Peninsula is pretty fascinating and fun to draw, especially in winter: there are a lot of industrial ruins from when this was copper mining country, along with lots of ornate gingerbready buildings from the 1800s. So you’ve got these hard edges and lines and detail work, and then it’s all mounded with these organic masses of visually depthless white snow. It’s pretty beguiling.
Last week was all faces, and I wasn’t happy with any of them, but I liked at least a little about each. My son’s picks were tied between these two: the anxious elf, and Selma from Black Circle(a Swedish horror film I really, really liked)
In both cases, I agree with him that I captured and clearly communicated the emotion—but he didn’t have the advantage of seeing the reference images. My Selma is too long-faced, relative to the screencap from the film, and looks a good deal older than the model. Meanwhile, I muffed the hair on my elf pretty badly, not really at all capturing the cosplayers almost quasi-bouffant situation. Also, she’s so stuff across the shoulders. The model had tension in her right shoulder–it was how she was holding her weight in her seated position–but she wasn’t rigged like I drew.
This, of course, invites the question of what I think I’m actually trying to do; if I want a photo-perfect rendition, why not just show you the photo instead of the sketch?
I think my pick for last week is this guy:
There is a lot wrong here—honestly, his open right eye is sorta mad whack, right?—but what’s right is the squinch across the bridge of his nose, and the way that sneer pulled his nose into this asymmetrical pillar. I’m also pretty happy with the mouth and lips. This was my third or fourth shot it capturing this guy’s gesture, and also his age. Young faces are really hard, because you have to balance putting down enough graphite to communicate the shape and shadow without putting down so many that you begin to communicate rough skin, crows feet, and all the door prizes that come with surviving past 30.
Everything in this life is about telling enough, but not too much.
My son picked this as the Sketch of the Week, noting that he liked the angle of her head, and that it came out well overall.
He wasn’t alone. Folks glancing at my journal last week were invariably drawn to that sketch, and thought it “came out well.” I tend to disagree, which makes for sort of an instructive example:
This is a good sketch, but a poor likeness of the model. I was working from this image of Anya Taylor-Joy:
There’s a slightly broad roundness to ATJ’s face, that coupled with her fine features is vaguely Fae and unnatural. It’s that presence that leads to her being strong in the roles where she’s strong.
I caught something of her gesture and posture in my sketch, and maybe even some of the energy in her hair, but I captured none of that changeling quality that makes Anya Taylor-Joy immediately identifiable as Anya Taylor-Joy (hell, the AI I’ve been monkeying with to try and automate alt text for images—and which more often than not sort faceplants—correctly identified this black-and-white photograph as Anya Taylor-Joy; I think the above alt text for that image is the first time I’ve ever used the AI generated attempt without modification).
I tried for Anya Taylor-Joy, and ended up with a rough approximation of a Nagle Woman—given my background and age, that isn’t surprising. Heck, it isn’t even bad: I sorta like Nagle, and the sketch at the top of this page is leagues ahead of where I started a year or two back.
It’s not bad, but it isn’t Anya Taylor-Joy, either.
