This was another split decision sketch week. I was actually mostly happy with every sketch this week (which is extremely rare) but also felt that each of them had unresolved issues, either with legibility or just minor composition decisions early in the sketch that ended up creating headaches.
At any rate, my son felt that these two were the best showing.
He really liked how the hands loomed out of the gloom, and the overall gesture in the second sketch. I really liked working on the first (the extremely foreshortened hands were both challenging but super engaging to work on) and the second is, as discussed in the past, an indisputable crowd-pleaser (saucy powerful ladies garner second glances and clicks—although, that aside, capturing the depth of the way she is sitting and the angled and occluded way the axe-hand-arm interact was really pleasingly challenging).
Final note: For ladies and gent of a certain age, the title of this post will trigger a potentially catastrophic earworm. To the rest of you, I offer a mostly forgotten one-hit wonder of my Cold War youth, the presumably ironically (???) named Georgia Satellites.
This was another week of sketches more about shading and volume than form. My son slightly preferred this first sketch (the model was wearing crazy long-fingered claw-gloves):
But he also really liked this water bottle sketch:
I recognize that the top sketch is more compelling (scantily clad women in powerful poses are a crowd-pleaser!) but the bottle was a bigger victory. The “Flex” sketch was from a two-dimensional image on my phone; I sketch that way a lot, and have gotten accustomed to translating two dimensions of pixels into two dimensions of graphite on wood pulp. The water bottle was just sitting on the table IRL. When you are sharing actual real space and time with an object, it’s much harder to fight the brain’s need to tell stories about what the “actual” shapes are, and instead let the eye tell the hand what it sees where.
Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:
Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.
Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.
A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).
Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.
My son was extremely emphatic that this was the sketch of the week, despite it being a week of many good sketches for me:
The reference is another still from a horror movie (frustratingly, I cannot recall what film; I think it was a short indie film, but can’t even—Oy! I just remembered! It’s The Blue Drum!) The film wasn’t much to shout about, in terms of story, but I liked it visually; it was understated and made good use of light and framing.
At any rate, my son really liked the shadows and shading and the way that (with his help) I captured how piercing the actress’ eyes are in the particular still frame. As we chatted, it seemed to me what he liked about this sketch was the restraint: it put on the page what needed to be there to capture the mood and her strength, and left off the page what wasn’t part of that. Thinking this one over—and continuing to sketch this week—I was reminded of a bit in John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. If you’ve never read it or seen it, the film with Will Smith is a very faithful adaptation, and worth your time. There’s also an audio drama (or maybe a stage recording?) of it floating around out there, with Alan Alda as Flan, which is great.
At any rate, there’s a point where Flan—an art dealer and collector, passionate about art but no artists himself—recalls his kids having this amazing art teacher in grade school:
FLAN
Why are all your students geniuses in the second
grade? Look at the first grade. Blotches of
green and black. Look at third grade.
Camouflage. But the second grade --your grade.
Matisses everyone. You've made my child a
Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into
the second grade! What is your secret?
THE TEACHER
Secret? I don't have any secret. I just know
when to take their drawings away from them.
So, that’s what I guess I’m trying to learn now: when to take my drawings away from myself.
As an aside, if I’d been left to my own devices to pick a sketch of the week, I would have chosen this one. Yes, it’s also one that I took away from myself at the rate time (or nearly so), but that isn’t why I’d pick it. I like it because it felt the best working on it, flowed the most naturally and painlessly from pencil to paper. That’s no measure of art or craft, but it left me inordinately fond of this sketvh, because I so enjoyed the process of becoming with it:
My son is into D&D and Magic and martial arts, so he sorta loved all of the sketches from this past week, which was all fantasy topics. He thought “Cloaked” was the standout, because the shadows gave it the best depth:
He also liked the rightsized detailing on the “Herald of the Odd God” and the gesture of the man she struck down:
I also liked how this shaman wailing for her demon lover came out. The technique isn’t great—she almost drifts into Ninja Turtle territory, for godsake—but it’s really legible: It catches the eye from a distance, is easy to immediately read, and worth giving a second look. Honestly, should I really be asking for more? It’s sorta like last week’s deep sea diver: a reminder that composition and technique and artistry aren’t the goal on their own, but at the service of catching someone’s eye and making it worth looking twice.
I’ve been thinking more and more about shade and tone and value, and how much more important to form these are than line is. I have pretty crummy distance vision, so just taking off my glass is a quick reminder: most of the time, I mostly cannot see lines at any meaningful distance. Instead, my brain intuits form by assessing tonal values.
So, the big project right now is turning that whole processing system off in my head, so the hand can just draw the layers of darkness the eye sees, without the stupid brain telling me what’s round and where a corner comes together at 90 degrees. Yeah, that lip is round in real life, but it is flat on paper and just grading from deep black to untouched; that beam’s corner where it meats the joist is 90º on my porch, but is waaaaaay closer to 140º on the paper; the same shadow is way darker on the interior face of the beam than it is on the side.
Anyway, my son opined that “Bit Lip” was the best sketch of the week, so I’m posting that here:
But I think I was more pleased with “Porch Detail”; I’ve struggled mightily to “unsee” 90º angles in architecture, and I think I finally got there on this sketch.
That said, my boy is right: the lips are a more compelling picture overall, even if technically rougher.
Meanwhile, I’m tossing this guy in as a bonus, because he’s proven sort of a mystery: it’s a failed sketch, to me, totally missing what I was trying to capture, and pretty technically sloppy. But everyone who glances him in my journal asks about him. There’s something about him that is speaking to people along a wavelength I cannot detect. 🤷♀️
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.
