I spent the tail end of 2025 trying to bridge the gap between sketching and portraiture—little of which I shared, because every inch of progress uncovered miles and miles of deficit. Get a lip right, and realize you have no idea how to communicate the junction of nose and eyes; get the features right, and you realize you’re clueless on how to capture hair. Maybe you nail the expression and hair, but ferfucksake your little girl looks like a 50-year-old man!
…and so on.
Anyway, here are two sketches from the first week of the year that my son thought came out nicely. I agree that I got what I wanted with the hair with both, and that the tiniest victory is still a victory. 🏆
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.
Last week was Chanukah, which means I had dreidels lying around, hence this sketch from life. If anything demonstrates my progress over the last two years of sketching, this is it:
In real life, a dreidel is a roughly rectilinear solid that’s basically a modified cube, each side of which is bears a roughly rectilinear character, inscribed squarely on that face. The whole thing has radial symmetry along a central vertical access (or else it wouldn’t spin).
In a drawing, there isn’t a single 90º, nor a single non-angled line. Drawing it accurately to life means making everything about it wrong on the paper. Two years ago that simple fact made me batshit insane; my stupid eyes saw 90º angles all sorts of places where they were not actually visible, and even when I convinced my eye to see what it saw instead of what it knew, my traitorous hands kept drawing the 90s they knew to be true in life, rather than the 85s and 95s and 142s the eyes could see from where they were sitting.
This time? None of that sturm und drang. I spun a dreidel, I saw a dreidel, it fell, and I drew:
Tonight I’m told is Erev Kristmas. May it be a joyous one to those who observe, and a peaceful Nittel Nacht for the rest of us.
My short cosmic-horror-IKEA-home-inspction-reality-show-Jews-CrypotJews-JewsOfColor-siblings story, “The Nölmyna,” made it into Reactor’s 2025 “Best of…” antho (grab your free copy, no strings attached). I always like these, because I’m more of a Kindle/paper reader than a phone/tablet/laptop reader, but I especially like this year’s edition because I’m in it, with my name on the cover and everything.
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.
I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.
1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter. A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again. Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.
You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:
“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”
You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…
I repost this every year mostly because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But I also come back to it again and again because it is a damned near perfect piece of writing. (If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)
3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”
I share this because the song cracks me up and I sorta love Wednesday’s “Pocahontas” speech, but also because there is a way that the writers put “majority unpleasantness” on display here that I really miss. The depiction of “Running Bear” is cruel, but also empowering. I felt seen, as a chubby insecure Jewish kid watching this scene.
4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪
Man, I remember when this song was big when I was little; you couldn’t turn on AM radio without hearing those synths from Halloween onward. Man, the memories! ♬♫♪
5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)
I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV- or radio-related. 🤷♀️
I hope your T-day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble! 🦃💀
Last week was “parts of faces” week in my journal. I was fairly pleased with all of them, but this schnozzola stood out:
Noses are hard. Mostly that’s because of a lack of hard lines (see my late 2024 complaint that “there is no such thing as a ‘nose’“). But even in profile—the one position where the nose does have a hard definitive outline—it’s still really hard. It’s a damned odd shape, unique to each individual. It grabs an inordinate amount of our visual attention, and we’re extremely sensitive to the intricacies of that shape. It’s like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina never said: “All eyes are alike; each nose is unhappy in its own way.”
Anyway, I think this is the first nose I’ve ever gotten right.
I can never decide if these little guys are extremely sad, or sort of inspiring. They’re stunted and twisted by their constraints, but also tenacious despite insurmountable concrete limitations.
If you’re looking at this, you’re almost by definition just a twisty little city tree like me. And, now that I think about it, probably that tree—which I’ve regularly walked past for maybe 30 years now—doesn’t have too high an opinion of me: I could literally go anywhere in the world, and haven’t gotten any farther than he has.
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.
