This is the final Sketch of the Week for 2025. It’s a charcoal I did to mail to my nephew, who’s in whatever-comes-after-basic-training for the US Army, down in San Antonio. No snow there, so I’m sending him some of ours.
I wasn’t super happy with this one (but much less happy with everything in my journal; I’ve spent the last couple weeks trying to learn to quickly capture facial expressions, and now feel more face-blind than when I began).
My son opined that my dissatisfaction with this charcoal arose from the fact that a deciduous tree has harder lines and holds snow differently than a pine, and thus doesn’t lend itself to the sort of gauzy effect I got in Week 49. I think I maybe just lucked out last week and ended up punching well above my weight. I did like the way further mixing media (adding in white gel pain overtop the Mod Podge that’s overtop the soft charcoal) made the snow pop the way I like.
Anyway, it’s still winter here, so expect further snowy trees in your future.
I was up in Prudenville, MI, visiting my in-laws for Thanksgiving and took some pictures. It had snowed before we arrived, and then snowed much more overnight. There was a fair bit of digging out to do so we could get our early start to get our son to his bus so he could travel 11 hours back up to Michigan Tech for finals, and then take another 11-hour bus home again within a couple weeks.
This is my fourth charcoal sketch, working with that same old and forgiving willow charcoal. A nice thing about willow charcoal is that it erases damn near completely. This is great for me, because it lets me build up a tree “logically”: I can rough in the tree, then start erasing back down to white paper for the snow while deepening the blacks with more charcoal for the deeper shadows.
The tricky bit is that willow charcoal is so soft and forgiving that it is damn near ephemeral. If you want the sketch to stop changing, you have to seal it. I don’t own any fixative, so instead I cut old Mod Podge with a little water and spray it in sloppy puddles over the drawing, than squeegee it with an old plastic gift card or credit card or whatever. This lowers the contrast, bringing down my whites and blending in my darks (which is a bummer), but it imparts a streaky surface finish I really, really, really like. Also, it’s fun to have this whole other dimension along which to experiment with the drawing once the drawing is done: changing the thicknesses of the application, adding more layers, squeegeeing in different directions, etc.
FUN FACT: Prudenville, MI is the setting for most of what’s in this essay from 2014 or 2015.
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.
🎄❄🎅🏿
Merry Xmas, gentiles!
May all your wishes come true, and may you stay awake to see them do so!
I’m a Jew—born and raised—but I come from a “mixed” family (they say “interfaith” now). My dad is a Jew, but my mom was raised Christian. Both my maternal grandparents—with whom my sisters and I spent a lot of time—were practicing Christians. Interfaith families are really common now (my wife and I are mixed), but were much less so when I was young.
As you’re likely aware, back when I was a kid there weren’t a lot of Xanukah songs for us Jewish kids. But there were absolutely zero songs for mixed half-a-Jews with an Xmas tree and a Xanukiah and a cat that managed to catch fire in the Xanukah candles every year and Xtian grandparents who came to town on Xmas Eve specifically to partake in the Jewish tradition of Xmas Chinese food.
There weren’t many mixed kids like us—and there weren’t any songs or holiday specials or children’s books that reflected what we saw and felt and loved about wintertime.
So these are my songs, for all the little intersectional mixed kids out there, who don’t have any holiday songs to sing.
I’m a Jew—born and raised—but I come from a “mixed” family (they say “interfaith” now). My dad is a Jew, but my mom was raised Christian. Both my maternal grandparents—with whom I spent a lot of time growing up—were practicing Christians. Far from shockingly, my own marriage is mixed (my wife was raised Catholic, our kids are Jews who end up participating in a lot of Xtian traditions). Interfaith families are really common now, but were much less so when I was young.
As you’re likely aware, back when I was a kid there weren’t a lot of Xanukah songs for us Jewish kids. But there were at least some. Meanehle, there were absolutely zero songs for mixed half-a-Jews with an Xmas tree and a Xanukiah and a cat that managed to catch fire in the Xanukah candles every year and Xtian grandparents who came to town on Xmas Eve specifically to partake in the Jewish tradition of Xmas Chinese food.
So, listen, America: As a rule, we’re a nation that always wants everyone to be one thing or another thing—black or white, nerd or jock, Jew or Gentile, girl or boy. We don’t have much patience for things that are mixed and ambiguous and a lil-o’-both, neither hot or cold. Subsequently, most of us neither-fish-nor-fowl spend a(n un)healthy portion of our lives aggresively trying to be One True Thing. I was in my 20s, and in a Women’s Studies class, before I learned what the hell “intersectionality” was, and my identity began to finally start to make any sense to me.
Anyway, there weren’t many mixed kids like me when I was growing up—and there weren’t any songs or holiday specials or children’s books that reflected what I saw and felt and loved about wintertime.
So these are my songs, for all the little intersectional mixed kids out there, who don’t have any holiday songs to sing.
Enjoy!
CONTEXT: I grew up outside of Detroit, where we were taught to never, ever go out on ice (very few ponds froze solidly, because so many were spring fed, or had weird inflows of nice warm waste that kept the ice rotten). But one time I was walking on a gravel path around a pond, scuffing my feet, and the gravel went shooting out over the thin, glass-smooth, clear ice and made this most amazing space-phaser-time-portal-starship-battle-pew-pew-pew! sound that I love-love-loved! (My ongoing experiments in slinkiphonics have largely been about chasing this Good Noise™ and wielding).
This is that sound:
(And here’s a bonus Winter Wonderland 🐻 bad judgement call)