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.
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.
My son really liked the depth on the skull, but his actual vote for this week’s Sketch of the Week was this one of Mr. Hori from the film Noroi: The Curse, noting “the expression … is incredible”:
I personally was unhappy with how I elongated the face; Mr. Hori’s face is fundamentally round, but my hand kept wanting to regularize him against Munch’s “Scream,” I guess 🤷♀️.
I do feel like I get at least close to the extremity of Mr. Hori’s terror in that scene. (The actor, Satoru Jitsunashi, is pretty amazing in that role; he totally makes the movie for me.) Here’s the reference image (more or less; I was working from several stills I grabbed from the movie, because his whole face wasn’t ever in frame at once):
This week’s sketch is watercolors and India ink, of a house up the street after the sun has dipped below the treeline, but is still above the horizon:
Back when I was a teen I was taught two ways to use India ink: dip pen and bamboo calligraphy brush. You can do a lot with either, but Jesus are they fiddly. Also, the old bottle of India ink I have is not waterproof, which is great for certain effects, but often maddening overall (esp. against watercolor).
So this was done with Faber-Castell Pitt pens, which are amaaaaazing. Yeah, a dip pen can give you a much finer line, and an ink brush can do really interesting dry-brush and textural things that you can’t coax out of a Pitt pen. But in terms of bang-for-buck (esp. when the “buck” translates to hair-pulling frustration), the Pitt pen is hard to beat:
The India ink is dark and flat and deep, water soluble/flowable when first applied, but then dries absolutely waterproof. They have a ton of different nibs. For this sketch I used a 0.3 fine liner and a soft-brush (the later nicely emulates doing wet-brush work with a Japanese calligraphy brush, giving you all the expressiveness and none of the sorrow). The color of the sky was me experimenting with wet-on-wet watercolor.
My son voted for the upper sketch, noting “holy heck I love the shadows on the flowers.” The model for this was a little table near the entrance of the Unitarian church where my congregation held Kol Nidrei service on Oct 11. I’m on our Safety Committee, and so had a shift watching the front door. Thankfully, it was an extremely boring shift, hence the sketch.
The lower sketch is based on Diane Arbus’s “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962.” The sketch maybe looks pretty odd if you aren’t familiar with the reference. (Otto noted, “He’s adorable but I confess the angle of the head is kinda confusing me.” Then, after seeing the original, added “Pfff okay he just looks like that” and “Is that a grenade!?”)
Here’s my photo of a reproduction of Arbus’s original photo (which, stated like that, begins to sorta feel like I’m making a cheap Duchamp joke):
Just a quick, loose sketch I did of our rabbi at the bimah while she was leading Rosh Hashanah services. (Our particular rabbi trained as a cantor before being ordained, and happens to play harp; harp isn’t a standard part of Jewish services.)
My son voted this sketch of the week because “I really like the curves on the harp. All the geometry in that one is very beautiful.” (I spent most of last week working on faces, which I’m terrible at; weak as it is, this is the best sketch of the lot 🤷♀️)
My son nominated this sketch, noting: “That one in the back looks like it has strong opinions.” I can’t quite recall where I saw these little guys, just that it was in a Michigan State Park this past summer, as part of a canoe trip that went moderately off the rails (massive duckweed, inclement weather, thousands of dead fish blocking the river, etc.) This park was maybe our third choice, in terms of places we were supposed to be that night.
For the record, I was almost positive he was either gonna chose the Jubilant Sorceress or Captain Tenacity:
Mostly I like how the two images interact (they were in adjacent slots on the spread). The reference for the sorceress is my wife in a Halloween costume she got for cheap at a thrift shop a few years back, while the captain is me about 20 years ago. Serendipitously, the ratio between their sizes is roughly our real-life size difference.
My best sketch from Week #37-2024 is this one of a young Salvador Dali:
My reference for the sketch was this picture of Dali and Man Ray I stumbled across on the Library of Congress website:
Until I saw this photograph, it never dawned on me that Man Ray might be Jewish (which he was), nor that he was American-born (I thought he was French, because he was most famous for the work he did while living in France), nor that he thought of himself as a painter (I knew him for his photography). 🤦♀️
For the record, the Young Dali sketch narrowly beat out this space captain from Friday, September 13. She is taking no shit, folks:
My son suggested I share this one, which he characterizes as “handception” . The sketch I’m highlighting is the lower one, but it doesn’t make sense without the context of the larger page, so here you go:
