Tag: newsF

Throwing shade (Sketches of the Week for Week 19 of 2025)

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:

Pencil sketch of a close-up of a woman's mouth; she's biting the corner of her lower lip.

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.

Pencil sketch of the detail of a timber supporting beam holding up a joist supporting a section of overhanging porch roof.

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. 🤷‍♀️

Pencil sketch of a seated man in a full Victorian diving suit

To be clear: I am in no way suggesting that IKEA may pose an existential threat to the fabric of reality

My latest horror story, “The Nölmyna,” is now officially published and free to read on Reactor: https://reactormag.com/the-nolmyra-david-erik-nelson/

A few months back I hung out with Ann VanderMeer, who edited this story for Reactor, at a conference in Florida. We ended up talking about Grady Hendrix, and I mentioned that this story sort of arose out of my frustration with Hendrix’s first book, Horrorstör. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with that book—which I really liked—just that it wasn’t the story I would have written about IKEA. This one is. 

I’ve spoken before about how much of my writing (and, I believe, much of art in general) arises from frustration that some artist Isn’t Doing It Right, Dammit!™. That’s certainly the case here: I wrote “The Nölmyna,” in part, because Hendrix hadn’t Done It Right, Dammit!™, and so I’d better just jump in and take care of that.

But it wasn’t until this morning that it dawned on me how deeply unreasonable it was for me to pick up Horrorstör and expect it to be the story I expected, because I have deeply weird feelings about IKEA that are simply not the norm:

Almost 20 years ago I was diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia. This is well managed now, but I continue to struggle with certain public spaces, especially those like IKEA: cavernous places that have poor sight lines, lots of people, no windows, and obtuse wayfinding. I can function in these places, but I experience dissociation and depersonalization, intrusive thoughts, a free-floating dread, and pretty much would rather be anyone or anyplace else. If you’ve ever been too stoned on too much edibles, you’re in the ballpark. 

IKEA is the seat of cosmic horror for me. This morning it dawned on me that maybe other people don’t experience this. Like, when I say “I hate IKEA,” what I mean is “When I’m in IKEA, I often feel like it would be better to stop breathing and being alive anymore.” I’m beginning to suspect when other people say “I hate IKEA,” they just mean “it’s crowded and weirdly stuffy” or “that furniture only holds up half the time” or “my partner and I always get in arguments there about lamps.”

Anyway, the publisher’s legal team very nicely asked me not to call the store “IKEA” in this story. But it’s IKEA. This story is about the true nature of IKEA and the distinct possibility that, through no fault of their own, they are creating the conditions for the absorptive annihilation of All of Everything by an Eminent and Imminent Immanence.  You’ve been warned.

The girls ain’t all right… (Sketch of the Week for Week 18 of 2025)

My son and I once again were of differing opinions. I thought the best sketch from last week was this one:

A pencil sketch of a woman sitting on the floor, defeated, head hung low and hair obscuring her face, hands planted on knees.

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:

A pencil sketch of a woman on the floor, reaching up toward the viewer as that viewer recedes up and away.

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.

Our reach exceeds our grasp (Sketch of the Week for Week 17 of 2025)

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.

A pencil sketch of a left hand reaching up out of the gloom.

♬♫♪ This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on our sun…♬♫♪ (Sketches of the Week for Week 16 of 2025)

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.

A pair of pencil sketches. The upper sketch shows an wiry old bald man with an enormous beard. He's depicted from the chest up, and seems to be somewhat windswept. The lower sketch shows a cherry tree just in blossom as the sun rises behind it, throwing it into sharp contrast.

This might be an extremely important short story to read right now

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld magazine.

As an aside, and totally unrelated to why this is an important story (and especially so right now), this piece both explains and perfectly epitomizes why I love the stories I love, and what’s missing from those I don’t love, for whatever that is worth.

Cyberpunk is Gen X’s “populuxe”—or using aesthetics to predict the future

Burning Chrome was a favorite of mine in the mid-1990s, when I first read the title story in an Oxford sci-fi anthology I found for a couple bucks at a used bookstore.

Cover art for William Gibson's short story collection BURNING CHROME. Shows a pixelated blue/grey hued bust of a human figure.

Before that decade (and century, and millennium) was done, I’d read every one of these stories more than once, fascinated with the future Gibson painted, one I could see just around the corner. Some of these stories (like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and “Dogfight”) I read over and over and over again. The best of these (esp. those last two) are really solid, tight, classic noir tales (albeit ones modeled after Jim Thompson’s The Grifters more than Dashiel Hammett’s gumshoes). The rest are, at best, stylistic sketching exercises; they more often have punchlines than plots. Gibson wrote all but three of these stories before Neuromancer, his debut and breakout novel (published in 1984.) Prior to 1982, Gibson doesn’t appear to have precisely known what a plot is. I’m not sure he’d argue with me on that; he’s said himself that although he’d been writing “stories” since the 1970s, the first one that was actually a proper story was ”Burning Chrome” (published in 1982, and basically a prototype for Neuromancer).

Cyberpunk is a future that looks an awful lot like the past, especially now (although even then, Gibson was firmly rooted in the past, sometimes formally—as with “The Gernsback Continuum”, other times more subtly, as with the noir plots he gravitates toward, and which become the heist/resistance themes that seem to form the skeleton of most cyberpunk stories still).

I’m old now, and Gibson, it turns out, is to me what Hugo Gernsback/1950’s “Populuxe“/Frank Frazetta/“Googie”/Eero Saarinen were to him. I think it’s appropriate that these are primarily visual artists and movements: Gibson has always been more of a visual artist and stylist than a writer, despite how culturally and politically prescient his writing has been. I’m given to wonder if that is why he’s proven so upsettingly accurate in his predictions (which I don’t think he thought of as predictions at all): the “Deep Pilot” might express itself in words, but runs its pattern matching on a purely aesthetic basis. We may be talking apes today, but at heart we will always be the monkeys that first daubed paintings of the world we hoped—or feared—we’d soon see on French cave walls.

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

William Gibson

The bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages

Before this year, I had no clue The Power or Naomi Alderman existed—despite the acclaim the book met when it was published in 2016, and the fact that its apparently been made into an Amazon mini-series starring Toni Collette, who I absolutely love. A colleague in a crit group read a story I was working on, and recommended I read this. She was absolutely right.

Cover are for the near-future scifi dystopia novel THE POWER by Naomi Alderman shows red hand print overlayed with a winding root-like/lightning-0like pattern in grey.

When I say this is the bravest and most horrifying book I’ve read in ages, I’m not exaggerating. I actually had to stop about 10 minutes from the end because I was in a Thai restaurant in Orlando and was on the verge of bursting into tears, and didn’t want everyone staring at me. This book is easily better, and darker, than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (both a book and artist I hold in hella high regard).

One clarification: when I told my wife that this book was the bravest and most horrifying thing I’d read in years, she totally misunderstood what I found horrifying in the book. She assumed I was upset by the rapes. There are several very graphic and traumatic rapes of men by women in this novel, as well as broader sexual subjugation of men.

Frankly, none of that really bothered me. I’ve read fictional depictions and non-fictional accounts of the rapes of men and boys that I’ve found more upsetting. Talk to anyone who’s worked for child protective services and you’ll hear an earful. Humans are, on balance, awfully creative when it comes to being awful.

What got me about this book is that, evidently and despite it all, there was some small part of me that had continued to really and deeply believe that “everything would be better if women were in charge.” Alderman meticulously dismembered and violated that foolish, optimistic child that was still hiding inside me.

The only thing worse than being alone in a dark place is not being 100% sure you’re alone in that dark place (Sketches of the Week for Week 14 of 2025)

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.”

A pair of pencil sketches. The top sketch shows an eyeball in the darkness, the lids being pulled back by finger and thumb. The lower sketch shows a baboon's teeth screaming from the darkness.
A pencil sketch of teething smiling out of the gloom.

All of this was inspired by this sculpture by Hirotoshi Ito:

A sculpture by Hirotoshi Ito, of what appears to be a river-smoothed stone with a brass zipper on it. The zipper is open, revealing smiling human teeth.

Feel free to google him. There’s more Ito where that come from.

The Loneliness of the Groundling Luchador (Sketch of the Week for Week 13 of 2025)

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:

A luchador ("Mexican wrestler") leaping from the ropes to smash down upon his opponent outside the ring. That opponent gazes back up at his imminent ass-whooping and mutters "oh damn"

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:

A pencil sketch of a stone on a sandy outcrop over water. The stone is brightly lit, and its shadow is sharp and deep.

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.