One “Not Angry, Just Disappointed” Man (Sketch of the Week for Week 15 of 2026)

Last week was a series of sketches based on a bunch of screencaps I took while watching 12 Angry Men. The reference for this sketch is Joseph Sweeney playing Juror #9. I don’t know that it’s really much of a likeness to Sweeney, but I really loved his face and gesture—honestly, I sorta loved every frame of this film, just as visual compositions.

A pencil sketch modeled on Joseph Sweeney as Juror #9 in TWELVE ANGRY MEN.

Reflections from the Aucilla River

Last week was my wife’s and daughter’s Spring Breaks, so we drove with the dogs down to the Florida Panhandle, where we stayed in an especially crooked fishing shack hanging over the Aucilla River. From there, it was an easy paddle down to the Gulf of Mexico, complete with old-man’s-beard, leaping mullet, and easily spooked alligators.

Hotel Vertebrae (updated)

Context: Last week I attended ICFA—who are nice enough to invite me every year to read a story, comp me a couple meals, and otherwise leave me alone to mooch appetizers and wine from various receptions and schmooze with academic folks I’ve never met before and editors I know. On Saturday I attended a panel that featured Nancy Hightower, whose photography work largely focuses on capturing NYC cityscapes in puddles. Her work is absolutely stunning. Earlier that morning I’d gone to see a panel where Ann Leckie was being interviewed about her upcoming novel Radiant Star. Leckie mentioned, in passing, that she’d gotten some inadvertent writing advice while attending a beading class years ago, to the effect of “if you are looking for a structure and don’t have one, repetition always works.”

So that was what was in my head Saturday morning, when I looked at Hightower’s uncanny, liminal photographs of the exceptionally mundane airport conference hotel we’d all been living in for four days:

Mirrors are repetition machines; repetition is the fundamental rudiment of structure; structure is the lone difference between “art” and “a neat thing I saw”

… and then I was alone in my room with this shiny post-modern coffee table, and I had my phone in my hand, because I always have my phone in my hand, because we all always have our phones in our hands, and taking a picture is a helluva lot better for my mind than looking at the news one more time.

This is that picture.

Expect more of them.

Backs and Drapes (Sketch of the Week for Week 9 of 2026)

My wife and kids all preferred the first of these two sketches, while I felt the second was clearly better. This isn’t the first time we’ve disagreed about sketches, but it was the first time that none of us could intelligibly articulate why we were so certain of our position. Each just felt that it was totally self-evident which sketch was better, and trying to defend that was like trying to defend why blue is blue.

Matters of taste aside, a couple things became clear this week (which was, like last week, entirely dedicated to working with the new-to-me technique of laying down a light layer of graphite to start, so that I can draw in dark values with my pencil and “draw” in light values and highlights with my eraser):

  1. Work in this way makes it much easier to drape cloth in a naturalistic way
  2. Backs are hard for the same reason noses are hard: they are nominal regions defined by how we categorizing things in our head, not starkly delimited regions defined by hard lines (contrast: the eye, a beard, a profile, etc.) I.e., backs are another prime candidate for “draw with the eraser” approaches.
  3. It is intensely satisfying to start a drawing break by just laying in a nice smooth medium layer of graphite. Recommended.
Pencil sketch of a standing woman facing away from the viewer and draped in a white sheet, her back exposed.

Pencil sketch of a seated woman facing away from the viewer, her back exposed.

You can draw with your eraser‽ (Sketch of the Week for Week 8 of 2026)

I’ve been drawing for the last month, just not posting, because I’ve been really busy, and not really happy with many of my sketches.

In the middle of last week it dawned on me that instead of just layering up graphite on blank paper, I could start a sketch by laying down a more-or-less uniform mid-tone of graphite over the entire area. Then I’d be able to draw in darker darks in the shadows, and draw in brighter highlights with the eraser. 💡🤦‍♀️ (I am besought by extremely obvious revelations. Ask me how old I was when I first realized that the “Little piggie that went to market” wasn’t, like, wandering the aisles of a grocery store pushing a cart.)

Anyway, the end result are sketches with a dynamic range of tonal values I’m much happier with, where I work faster and find the work much more soothing overall.

My son’s pick for the week was the bottom sketch. He liked the lips.

Three pencil sketches of women. Top is loose gesture drawing of a dancer in profile, one hand held high and aloft, the other lower forming a strong diagonal line. Her forward foot is delicate pointed to touch the ground. The second is a quick gesture drawing of a woman crouched on the ground in the shadows holding a glowing orb. The final sketch is a quick portrait of a woman gazing up and away from the viewer.