Tag: newsD

Sketch(es) of the Week: A Cavalcade of Failed Faces (Week 6, 2025)

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)

Pencil sketch of an anxious lady elf.

a pencil sketch of a furious, yet determined, psychic (Selma from the film BLACK CIRCLE)

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:

Pencil sketch of a sneering young man.

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.

Highway Gothic (and its “Eldritch Serif” variant)

“Highway Gothic” is the informal name of the sans-serif typeface you see on American road signs:

Ice street signs showing the corner of Buckingham and Manchester

It’s formally known as the Standard Alphabets For Traffic Control Devices or the FHWA Series fonts. It was originally designed just after WWII, and optimized over time for legibility at a distance while traveling at high speeds.

I sorta love Highway Gothic. In part, that’s because I sort of love basic, sturdy industrial design; I’m the one guy who sorta loves the low-rent Brutalism of poured-concrete parking structures. But a big part of my love of that arises from the unintentional aesthetics that arise, for example, from the decay of that concrete smoothing to nubby rubble and rebar, or the way you can often see the grain of the plywood forms used to pour those Brutalist slabs.

Which brings us to why I have an especially tender spot for Highway Gothic:

I live in Michigan, where harsh weather and a poorly funded road maintenance program conspire to create an organically emergent “Eldritch Serif” variant of this sans-serif typeface. Here are a few choice examples from around town, where nature chose to add spidery tails and flourishes where man had specifically shaved them away, giving the letters subtle little horns and roots. The remind me of the tagin—little decorative flourishes or “crowns”—added to Hebrew letters in sacred texts, and signs of unrevealed truths; they are letters that are written, but we don’t yet know how to read.

We put up street signs; enthalpy and entropy add further signs of unrevealed truths buried in them. It takes brutal corners and straight lines, and grows roots and branches and tentacles from them.

The “Eldritch serif” variant of Highway Gothic is sort of my favorite thing, especially in the cold and gloom of Michigan winter.

Weathered street sign for Hill street.
Weathered street sign for Eisenhower street.

This is an especially gnarly one:

Weathered street sign show S. Main street to the right, and Ann Arbor-Saline road to the left

Sketch of the Week: A Generic Attractive Woman (Week 5, Jan 27 2025)

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.

A pencil sketch of a generic pretty woman (it was supposed to be Anya Taylor-Joy. *sighs*)

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:

A black and white portrait of Anya Taylor-Joy with her hand on her neck. She is wearing a dark dress.

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.

Sketch of the Week: A Four-Point Buck Watches the Inauguration (Week 4, Jan 21 2025)

This is one of those situations where the title says it all: my mom was watching the inauguration, livid, and looked up to see this fella watching alongside her. I’m sharing it because my son found it funny, but the sketch itself didn’t sit will with me. In reality, the deer looked gravely concerned about the future of democracy, where-as in my sketch he comes off as mildly outraged that humans have once again stepped in it and tracked it all over the rug. I imagine that maybe this was a case of the artist’s feelings tainting the clarity of his vision.

Anyway, I included the quick thumbnail I sketched afterward in the bottom left, because I felt like it more faithfully captured his true posture in Mom’s snapshot. That said, he still looks pretty angry. Or maybe not angry, precisely, just disappointed. He expected us to Be Best, and we fell far short. Sorry, m’man.

A couple pencil sketches of a four-point buck (male deer) looking in through my mom's living room window.

Sketch of the Week: Skull House (Week 3, Jan 17, 2025)

Here’s my son’s note, when I asked for his Sketch-of-the-Week input (every week I send him a picture of the previous week’s spread from my journal, showing that week’s five sketches, and ask for his feedback):

“Gotta be the skull house with the ladder…Something about the perspective gives me the sense that the skull is growing in size, or moving towards the viewer. I don’t know if it’s the best composition [of the week] but it’s the best vibes.”

A pencil sketch of a little girl climbing a rough-hewn wooden ladder into the nose-opening of a skull house cliff dwelling.

The reference here is a snapshot of my daughter climbing a ladder into some of the historic cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, plus a lot of public domain pics of old skulls I found on Wikimedia.

Personally, my pick for this week would have been this little girl I saw at the Cross Country Ski Headquarters near Roscommon, MI last weekend. I think of her as “Lil Puffball”:

On reflection, my son is right. I like Lil Puffball not because it’s a great sketch, but because it’s one I had to finish in just a minute or two, because I was working from life, not pics on my phone. Given the constraint, it represents big progress for me, in terms of craft. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun to look at, and I think it’s maybe lower on emotional content (to the viewer) than I’d like. When you look at Lil Puffball, you aren’t feeling what I felt looking at her. But when you look at Skull House, you get what I’m getting at. Also, Skull House is the first time (I think?) that I’ve really tried to bring together disparate reference images in order to really take a stab at fiction in a sketch.

For what it’s worth, it’s is cold as fuck here in Michigan (it was negative when I woke up, and mostly single digits all day), and it’s subzero where my son’s at (he goes to college just about as far into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as you can get). He has to go around in this get up:

Mad Max: Beyond Snowglobe

…because this is what his campus looks like:

A view of the frozen channel running between Houghton and Hancock, MI.

(Yeah, that’s a frozen canal running between two parts of Lake Superior, from when this part of the state was mostly only good for Copper and lumber.)

Sketch of the Week: Barbaric Yawp! (Week 2, Jan 6, 2025)

The Sketch of the Week for week #2 of 2025 ain’t much but it’s better than the rest (I largely focused on profiles last week, which are harder than you’d think).

But I’m selling this little guy short saying it that way; I actually really like how he came out. As a gesture drawing, I feel like I got the gesture I was after.

A pencil sketch of a little man loosing a barbaric "yawp!"

The reference was a snapshot my son took of me clowning around on a frozen waterfall when we were down in Santa Fe:

A photo of some foolish ld jackass (me) clowning around on a frozen waterfall near Santa Fe, NM.

For those who like references, I realize I’ve increasingly begun to resemble this poem, and maybe the poet.

Sketch of the Week: Santa Fe (Dec 30, 2024)

My wife is a teacher and both my kids are in school (one in middle, one at Michigan Tech), so we took a long family trip together over the Winter Break, riding Amtrak from West Michigan to Albuquerque, and then driving from there to Santa Fe.

I’ve been to Santa Fe before, but this was the first time that I really noticed the clear, sharp quality of the light (probably because it’s such a stark goddamned contrast to Michigan’s wintertime “It was evening all afternoon; It was snowing And it was going to snow” perpetual mudlight).

My God, that light! Those goddamned shadows! Anywhere you went in Santa Fe, it was like you could have cut each shadow out of black felt and pasted it down. If you’re trying to get your eye and head and hand around tone and value and light and shadow, it’s the place to be. My son favored this sketch for that reason:

Pencil sketch of the chimney and side of an adobe building in Santa Fe with stark shadows.

Here’s a bonus: A watercolor sketch of the evening view from outside the state park yurt we were staying in (gas heat, no water, and only $60/night!)

It’s a quick little thing, around 1″x2″, mostly to test out these watercolors my brother-in-law made for me from scratch for the holidays! (He’s mostly known for his knives, but is currently on hiatus from handmaking custom jobs. Folks can still buy his designs that are mass produced by bigger companies; I’ve been carrying one of his Feist front-flippers, and love it for everyday use. Such a great knife!)

small watercolor sketch of the evening view from outside a yurt in New Mexico near Santa Fe

Sketch of the Week: Conan(ii) (Dec 18, 2025)

A pencil sketch of Conan the Barbarian, based on a still from the 1982 film

My son advised I share this sketch of Conan the Barbarian (taken from the “What is Best in Life…?” scene—video at the bottom of this post) because I could also share my first stab at it, from back in September:

Sketch of Conan seated and delivering his "What is best in life…?" speech.

Here is the actual still I was working from:

A still image from the movie Conan the Barbarian, showing Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) seated, shirtless, and surrounded by other figures in a dimly lit setting. Candles are burning in front of them. Conan is delivering his "What is best in life…?" speech.

Why is my latest sketch better than my first stab?

Well, first off, I’ve loosened up on my fixation with line, and leaned more deeply into value. Like, honestly: there is no such thing as a “nose” as a discrete part of the face. It isn’t like the eye. The thing we call a “nose” is this notional region in the middle of the face defined by areas of shadow and highlight. Every time you use a line anywhere in drawing a nose, you end up with something cartoonish. Lips have largely the same issue: unless someone is wearing pretty heavy makeup, then the lip really isn’t delineated in the real world nearly so sharply as it is in our minds. In my latest sketch I used almost no lines on Conan’s face; I built them up using layers of graphite, and also paid attention to the levels of value within each value, making more intermediate stages. It helped to think of it in this manner: that I’m “building up” the face, not “drawing” it.

But it’s more than that, because I’ve also (just barely) gotten smarter about composition. The first drawing got problematic because I tried to capture the entire scene as shown in that frame. This entire film is full of beautifully composed shots, every frame worth its own Frank Frazetta oil painting. I didn’t have the space for that on the page, nor the skill in my hand and eye. In the newer sketch my reach doesn’t nearly exceed my grasp so terribly: I had room to capture just seated Conan at the proper scope and detail, and I did so.

And, finally, I didn’t shy away from the awkward face Conan is making in my screen grab; I leaned into the awkwardness (rather than trying to smooth it out and glass it over), and as such got much closer to capturing something sort of lovely and ineffable in his posture. I don’t know what that is, but I see it more and more often in my more recent sketches, when I get them right. It’s present in the lame buck, and the close-up of the thinking man’s gorilla, and the Florida turtle. In my head, I think of it as capturing the dignity of the thing in the world, being just exactly what it is.

Anyway, this is the final Sketch of the Week for 2024. Thanks for playing along!

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

ANNUAL REMINDER:

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such an arrangement, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Sketch of the Week: The Lame Buck (December 10, 2024)

A lame buck has been taking shelter around my mom’s place, and she snapped a picture that she shared with my sisters and me. He’d maybe been nicked by a car? Not bloody, but he had one leg he wasn’t using at all, just hanging limp, and was mostly spending his time bedded down. When she took the picture I used as the reference here, she was probably only about a yard away; he was right outside her TV room window.

What really struck me was how visible his ribs were. I didn’t imagine this story ending well for the buck, but a few days after I drew this she saw a group of bucks come and visit him, and then they all left together. This guy was still hobbling, but he was using all four legs and keeping up with his brethren.

The day after that I slow cooked an entirely unrelated buck’s shoulder for my wife’s extended family, who all came to visit for a day. #PureMichigan