This is my second attempt at sketching in charcoal. Instead of using a charcoal pencil (as I did in my first stab, which I wasn’t happy with), I used some old willow charcoal my wife had kicking around. This stuff is literally just charred sticks. It’s not nearly as dark as charcoal pencils, tending to more gray than black. But it is so soft that you can practically erase a line just by rubbing it out with your fingertips. It’s a blunt tool, but incredibly forgiving. As you build up layers of it working toward black, it basically grinds down to powdery ash. Drawing with it is half drawing and half finger-painting. Very fun and liberating, if you can release yourself from needing to control how things go.
My son characterized several sketches from this week as looking like “ghosts unwillingly dissolving.”
With that second sketch he noted that “the background shadows and the face shadows really look cut from the same cloth. That’s really hard to do but I think you did it there.”
I see what he’s saying, but in this case it was totally unintentional. It was only about a week later that I was clicking through various screenshots of old drawing instructional books I found on Pinterest, and saw a discussion of the problem of hard lines in primarily tonal studies. In both cases it was the use/absence of hard lines that got the effect that made them striking (on the upper sketch the left edge of the face has a hard delineation while the right is allowed to “dissolve”; on the lower the face is framed entirely in shadow, with no precise hard outline).
I wouldn’t have put all that together without his feedback. For my part, I just liked the emotions that wound up on the page.
My son thought this was the sketch of the week: “I like the way middle right seems to lean in a little. Makes it look the spookiest.”
I sorta preferred this one from earlier in the week:
This sketch was the hardest—in that I erased everything and started over several times—and the easiest, once I stopped listening to a brain that was telling me “this is an eye! this is a nose! those are lips, you idiot!” and just put black where I saw black. I sorta love how the lighting make so clear that there’s a skull under that skin and meat. If anything, my failure here is that I didn’t go for blacker blacks.
If you can turn off your brain and just let your eye tell your hand where the black goes, hardshadowed, dramatic chiaroscuro actually almost makes for the easiest sketches.
No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them 🤷♀️
This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).
I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.
The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.
Watch their faces. It’s fascinating how often you can see the cognitive dissonance, the battle of voices triggered in an average human’s head by being told they are beautiful. I don’t think this was the filmmaker’s point—in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the opposite—but it’s kind of heartbreaking. Why the hell should it be so hard to be told you are beautiful?
This video is ten years old. All of these kids are adults now (hopefully). Gott in Himmel how I wish there was a follow-up video of each of them being shown this video.
Week 40 was “Tree Week” in my journal, where I worked on capturing more different kinds of trees under different lighting conditions. It didn’t go superterrific, but my son liked this one because the overall composition communicated the scale nicely, and it captured something of the late-day autumn light in Michigan, which has an oddly specific angle and saturation.
I’m sharing it not because it’s especially good, but just because it puts me in the mind of Edward Hopper, who I think captured the unique (and uniquely enduring) dimensions of American Loneliness better than any other artist who has yet lived.
… because it isn’t a glass of water; it’s just a sketch. But I like how I began to capture the light here. I didn’t get it right, but I got closer than I think I’ve gotten on any sketch before, and I really do love light and shadow and refraction.
That said, I did a terrible job of capturing “glass” in this glass. Here’s one of my father’s finished drawings on a similar theme (though no water; his glass was entirely empty. Let that be a lesson to you.)
I’ve always loved this drawing, how precise and controlled it is, how it makes a flat white page into a space one can occupy. I suppose there’s a lesson there, too: the hours upon hours spent making a small orderly corner of the world where every lines makes sense and can be justified and defended, and the whole thing can be secured in a frame unchanging, so you can keep looking back at it and knowing it is there exactly as it should be.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur, which means there was a Yizkor service with my congregation, which means I spent much of the day thinking of my father (of blessed memory), who I loved a great deal, despite not necessarily liking him very much.
I mostly sketch from photographs, simply as a practical matter (I mostly work from home, and am mostly in a college town in mid-Michigan; nit a lot of horses and barbarian ladies sitting around my kitchen waiting to be models). But this gets me thinking a lot about how high-speed photography has changed drawing and painting, not by replacing them—the perennial anxiety about art and technology—but by giving the artist one more tool to see more clearly in ever smaller increments. At my most hopeful, I wonder about the ways genAI will offer creatives sharper scalpels and finer microscopes. (And at my least hopeful? There, I’m pretty hopeless.)
Anyway, last week was all “furious dancers,” a subject that is devilishly tricky to capture from life if you haven’t first had the benefit of capturing it from a snapshot.
This lady in the flowing skirt was my son’s favorite from last week. He insists it’s legible, but I worry; her posture is so striking and strange. Either way, it is indeed a good sketch, in that it captured what I hoped to capture. I just wonder if I maybe chose the wrong subject to begin with.
I think this one was my favorite. Draped cloth is a fun challenge in restraint, and I think both the dynamism of her gesture and its dignity and grace all came through. 10 of 10, A++; would draw again.
