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.
The reference was a snapshot my son took of me clowning around on a frozen waterfall when we were down in Santa Fe:
For those who like references, I realize I’ve increasingly begun to resemble this poem, and maybe the poet.
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:
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!)
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:
Here is the actual still I was working from:
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!
‘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.
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
Due to a split decision/ranked-choice vote, this week’s sketch is the thinking man’s gorilla (based on a blurry snapshot from the Columbus Zoo):
My son favored either the gorilla sketch (above) or the sketch of my wife in a bucket hat (below) Meanwhile, I preferred either the gorilla (above) or this sketch of my wife based on a photo we took this past Halloween (way down below). Thus, despite an abundance of qualified women, we wound up with a gorilla on top. Democracy is an imperfect system.
my wife in a bucket hatmy wife humoring her husband
I saw this little guy in a display tank at a ranger station in Apalachicola, Florida. To me it was a “fancy slider” (in Michigan you mostly see painted turtles–which tend to be big–and red-eared sliders, which are this guy’s size, but with a smooth shell). But apparently he’s really a Barbour’s map turtle. Like the sliders and painted turtles I’m used to, he has extremely pretty yellow pipping all along his body (which I didn’t even try to capture). What I was really taken with was that spiky shell, and his tiny dignity.
Both kids unanimously voted for this sketch, which is based on a photo I took in the summer of 2020:
My kids are the small figures playing in the surf near the middle of the image, but that isn’t why they chose it; they both really liked the play of the light on the water and the shadows on the beach.
I have to admit, I’m pleased with how the light on the water came out, too.
This week my son was entirely undecided; he liked everything. I was also pretty pleased, so here’s the full spread for the week:
I did the creep and her victim on different days, and wasn’t as pleased with how he came out, which is why he’s cropped out above. Both of those figures are based on reference photos from The Pose Archives, which I adore.
Monday is a composite of a stretch of beach north of Fisherman’s Island State Park (FUN FACT: most of it isn’t an island; it’s the lakeshore, and may now be entirely inaccessible due to climate change) with some cumulus clouds in my neighborhood. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be with clouds yet.
Wednesday is from a stock photo that’s been kicking around my phone for ages; I used him as a model for a six-limbed samurai squirrel back in June:
The squirrel was part of a joke either with my son or with my mom and sisters; I can’t really recall how I got there. A lot of what I do is the result of off-handed jokes gone too far.
This is based on a snapshot I took last winter, while visiting the Florida panhandle’s “Forgotten Coast” (which I understand is now its totally obliterated coast, at least in some of the parts we were in). Here’s the reference photo:
I won’t be shocked if someone tells me that isn’t an egret; I’m not much for identifying what I see.
Anyway, the egret wasn’t my son’s vote for this week. He liked this Oaxacan dancer in the big fancy hat:
He was particularly pleased by her clothes. I like her, too.
