Tag: NationalParks

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: