sketches

Day three hundred and twenty-nine: Late November in Minnesota can be so delightfully melancholy, especially when it hasn’t yet snowed. Bare trees, the last rake-missed leaves scattered and rustling beneath a low, overcast sky. Honking geese have left behind cawing black crows. Damp grays and browns settle and wait to be cloaked in a sparkling blanket of cold white. Today’s study, made on the iPad with my fingers, attempts to capture a bit of this mood, and includes elements I observed on an afternoon walk, one day after Thanksgiving.

Day three hundred and twenty-seven: Finding myself at the iPad with nothing to sketch, and with Thanksgiving recipes on my mind, I started doodling Brussels sprouts from memory. I love drawing on the pad directly with my fingertips because it seems easier to make both fluid and straight lines than with my digital pen. It was delightful to quickly squiggle out their wrinkled, layered leaves. I originally thought the sketch would be black and white, but an experiment adding green made me realize that the color unifies the disconnected lines of each sprout, and makes them more identifiable.

Day three hundred and twenty-five: About the time I put the digital pen to the pad, my good friend, Dana, called from Minneapolis. As we chatted, I started doodling away, and by the time I hung up, half the white space was filled in. The face and surrounding shapes I had drawn looked a little like the joker from a deck of cards, and so I went with it. Continuing the mode of automatic drawing, I let the lines lead me, and in the end, what you see here emerged as the sketch of the day.

Day three hundred and twenty-three: A couple of days ago, I imitated a color woodcut of Mount Fuji in Japan. This afternoon, while browsing through travel photos, I came across a couple shots of the mountain as seen from Tokyo at sunset. Very different from the 19th-century version, with the sprawling, modern city laid out before the ancient volcano. Adding little spots of red and white city lights was one probably the most fun, and a simple touch that I think gives the otherwise abstracted urban landscape a surprising sense of realism.