I didn’t post a sketch last week because 1) I was absurdly sick with influenza A and 2) wasn’t really happy with anything I drew that week. I’m less sick this week, and more satisfied with my work. My son voted for this sketch:
The reference image here is a sample from a reference image pack I found online. I originally took a run at it specifically because I figured it would be basically impossible for me to capture: the cloth’s draping was so complex, and my eyes really had trouble following it. I couldn’t conceive of how I’d communicate a figure I could hardly see.
In the end, this was a super revealing exercise for me: having all those familiar landmarks (eyes, ears, shoulders, hips) gone forced me to simply do the thing I’m always trying to do, and failing at: to look at the subject and draw what I’m seeing, and the feeling of seeing it, not my ideas of what a woman (or whatever) looks like, and what it takes to show one to someone on paper.
I’d thought it would be maddeningly frustrating, but it ended up being super relaxing. 🤷♀️
My son insisted that every sketch from last week had a claim on Sketch of the Week. While I wouldn’t go as far as him, I’m not gonna lie: I was really pleased with this batch, esp. Monday (“Warrior”), Thursday (“Shadow Dancer”), and Friday (“The Terror of Jim Carrey”)
Monday: “Warrior”—This is based on a photo I found on Pinterest, a platform that I’m embarrassed to admit I’m really liking, as it’s proving to be a really good source of reference images. I love the strength of that pose! There’s a lot I failed to capture here—the original model is quite muscular, while mine is almost gaunt; the original pose has this nearly bone crushing hauteur, and mine is almost contemplative—but I was really pleased with the strength in her stance, and I captured that. She feels unmovable, like a dolmen. This is definitely the best all around drawing from the week, according to my son, who really liked the values and shadow shading.
Tuesday: “Swordsman”—Another Pinterest find. My son really loved the dynamism of the pose and the economic capturing of the back muscles. I went after it because I found the pose both interesting, but challenging to make legible.
Wednesday: “The Ahmeek Stamp Mill Ruins”—This is a real place near where my son goes to university. The reference was a photo I took when we were visiting him a couple weeks back, and the ruins were buried in about four feet of snow. He really loved the subject matter, and thought I captured it well. I disagree, but it’s such a mind-bendingly weird place, I’m pleased I did as well as I did. I’m planning to take another stab at it in a larger format, and hopefully with watercolor.
Thursday: “Shadow Dancer”—A benefit of Pinterest is that it’s sent me in new directions looking for reference photos. It had not dawned on my before to look for dancers, but Pinterest is full of photos of them from all sorts of sources, and dancers strike some incredible and gnarly poses; such great monster and eldritch being fodder! This one is more abstract and less eldritch, but I loved what her shadow was doing on the wall.
Friday: “The Terror of Jim Carrey”—I modeled this off of a relatively famous set of pics of Jim Carrey. It’s not a good drawing of Jim Carrey, and it isn’t even really a good drawing of the actual gesture he’s making, which is a sort of mugging cartoonish surprise. But jesus!, what I got on the page was arresting; it captures legitimate terror for me in a way I’m having trouble articulating. I find that tiny scribble so goddamned disturbing, I’m fascinated.
We had a long weekend last week, and so drove up to visit my son at college and do some cross-country skiing. He goes to Michigan Tech University, which is in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s not just in the Upper Peninsula; it’s in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the northern most bit of this northern most bit of Michigan. Most folks have no idea how absurdly far from basically anything this is, and how off the beaten path basically the entire UP is. It’s a 10 to 12 hour drive from our house to his dorm. You can drive to Washington, DC quicker. Houghton is north of the 45th parallel and west of Chicago. Everyone there are Packers fans and, despite it being the birthplace of pro hockey, you basically so no Red Wings gear. It’s all pine trees, and they still have logging there. The mountains in the UP are some of the oldest in the world, clocking in at 2 billion years–making them older than the idea of trees. My kid goes from class to class kitted out like he’s in Mad Max: Beyond Snow Globe—not because he’s got an innate sartorial flare, but just as a practical matter. It’s not just absurd that this is part of Michigan; it feels sort of absurd that it’s part of this timestream.
As near as I can tell, the Keweenaw has been in a state of “Winter Weather Advisory” since late November. There are feet and feet of snow. It was snowing basically the entire time we were there, mostly sideways. Plows ran at all hours, and people were sort of perpetually shoveling. Once you were out of the town of Houghton (where the college is), it’s clearly a constant battle to keep roads passable and maintain at least one functional entrance to your house.
We were staying in a little town north of Houghton called “Lake Linden.” I have no clue why the town is called that, since the lake that it’s on the edge of is Torch Lake. We rented a Vrbo apartment that was in a brick building built in the late 1800s whose ground floor tenant was an ACE hardware, one of the town’s four or five clearly functional businesses. The Vrbo had 15-foot ceilings with 12-foot-tall windows, slept eight, allowed dogs, and cost us I think around $70 per night. If we’d stayed in Houghton we’d have paid $200 per night for a single room in a Super 8, and couldn’t have had the dogs with us. If we’d staid any further north, I think we’d still be there, forced into cannibalism or binge watching all of Bluey.
This sketch is the detail of the entrance to the neighboring building. It was built around the same time as the building we were in, but was of uncertain status. The side of it said “Dave’s Home Improvement Center” but neither of the two existing store fronts appeared to be going concerns, let alone dedicated to home improvement. One entryway had been renovated, with modern glazing and frames. The other was absolutely ancient painted steel and wood. Some of the brickabrack inside implied that maybe there was occasionally a farmer’s market held there, but none of that had happened recently. There was a ton of cilantro growing in trays, leggy and too tall, collapsing under its own weight.
The architecture in the Keweenaw Peninsula is pretty fascinating and fun to draw, especially in winter: there are a lot of industrial ruins from when this was copper mining country, along with lots of ornate gingerbready buildings from the 1800s. So you’ve got these hard edges and lines and detail work, and then it’s all mounded with these organic masses of visually depthless white snow. It’s pretty beguiling.
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)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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!)
