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:
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:
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.
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.
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
Where I live in Michigan, there are a lot of wetlands. As a rule, when you build something that creates a lot of impermeable surface (like a warehouse or parking lot), you have to create someplace for the water to go, so it doesn’t strain our storm water systems or deliver a concentrated flow of surface pollutants to the rivers.
In practice, that means that lots of rust-belt Michigan office buildings and strip malls (i.e., the natural environment where I grew up, riding skateboards and bikes and playing tag and setting off fireworks and playing with slingshots) have little scrubby neglected wetlands next to them. These can become remarkably healthy and resilient little ecosystems all their own. I saw this little guy (who I’m 90% sure was a juvenile sandhill crane) while sitting in the car outside a Target waiting for my wife. If you could zoom out on this sketch a click or two, you’d see an Applebees and a freeway and an abandoned Chuck E Cheese—the many vibrant biomes of Southeast Michigan!
I believe sandhill cranes were endangered in Michigan when I was a kid. They were certainly a rare and exciting sight. Now they’re getting to be almost a pest species in some places. Every spring they take it into their head that a section of paved bike trail in Island Lake Park belongs to them and attack the unwary. A pal of mine got a black eye from one. #PureMichigan
My son was really excited by how the reflections came out on this one, as am I. Water is really, really hard to unsee enough to capture it in graphite.
