bang bang 💥 (Sketch of the Week for Week 42 of 2025)

Extreme foreshortening is a really important compositional tool—it brings hella drama with little effort. It’s also hella mindbending: getting that sketch remotely right requires getting your brain to disregard all of the stuff it knows (A FIST IS WAAAAAY SMALLER THAN A HEAD!@!!!!1!!!!😱) and just let the hand make the pencil scratch out what the eye sees. It’s fun, once you get past tearing your hair out.

“he probably misses his old glasses” (Sketch of the Week for Week 41 of 2026)

I’ve spent the last week and some change trying to sketch individual rocks. My son pointed out that rocks are arbitrary shapes, so you can’t lean nearly so hard into the viewer’s inborn pattern recognition; sketching a rock takes you back to a very basic place of making a lot of exhausting and unsatisfactory decisions about which lines and values and volumes are needed to communicate “rock”—all of which makes going back to something man-made or highly defined (like glasses) feel like a vacation, despite the collection of curves and angles and refractions that had previously bedeviled you.

Hence why I spent two weeks drawing rocks, and you are getting my glasses instead.

BONUS: for those wondering about the title:

Proposal E doesn’t do what you probably think it does. (I am voting NO on PROP E)

This one is basically just for Ann Arborites:

Proposal E is on your ballot for the upcoming election (get those ballots in by Tuesday Nov 3!).

I’m gonna vote NO on Prop E.

Here is the entirety of the ballot language:

Creation and Governance of a Municipal Electric Utility
Shall Chapter 15 of the Charter be amended to require the City to establish a municipal electric utility and governance structure therefore?

That sounds good–so good, that I thought we’d already voted for this. This left me confused as to why I had to vote for this again, so I looked at the complete ordinance language that would be enacted if Prop E passes. I walked away more confused and started to get worried.

Anyway, here is the skinny:

  1. Prop E has nothing to do with the SEU that something like 80% of us supported and is already doing really good work that brings together renewable energy and justice. Bravo!
  2. Prop E is a totally separate parallel effort to buy the crappy power infrastructure we have (poles and lines and transformers and all the other things that blow down every time we have a big wind) from DTE
  3. That requires a massive immediate investment (on the order of $500,000,000 to $1 billion)
  4. That equipment has been neglected for decades (which is why folks are mad enough here to want to start their own power company), so we’d also inherit the maintenance burden on busted down old equipment
  5. That price tag does not include any way to generate power; we’d still need to buy that on the open market. We’d just be buying poles and wires.
  6. The only avenue to pay for this is basically rate increases, so power would get more expensive immediately (in a city already deep into a housing affordability crisis that is forcing out families and shrinking our schools), at a time when people are acutely aware of rising energy costs (data centers, A.I., wars in Europe and the Middle East, etc.)
  7. There is no recent example of a community successfully buying out a local utility company and converting it to a municipal utility. Boulder (a much wealthier community than Ann Arbor—which is by no means economically deprived) tried and failed. The successful municipal utilities here in Michigan were formed in the late 1800–1900s and were the original power companies in those areas; there are only two examples of a community buying out a traditional power company in Michigan, one is Bay City (which was already running its own municipal utility and bought out redundant grid structure) and the other Traverse City—who did so in 1912. Point being: conditions are somewhat different now, and pointing to success in Lansing (Lansing Board of Water & Light, founded 1885) and Holland (Holland Board of Public Works, 1893) are not good priors for us buying ill-maintained second-hand equipment from DTE in 2027 in a city that has no power generation capacity and nowhere to build it.

This roundtable discussion composed almost entirely of environmentalists, activists, and developers with a track record for sustainability and eliminating reliance on fossil fuels helped me understand what I was missing when I looked at this inscrutable wall of text:

Give this a watch and don’t forget to get your ballot in early or show up in-person on Nov 3.

Gimme a head with hair ♬♫♪ REDUX (Sketches of the Week for Week 39 of 2026)

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This week was Hair Week. My family preferred the Friday sketch (on the right above)—and they’re right, it was the best hair of the week—but I sorta liked Monday best overall (on the left). It got her expression and vibe right. Also, the glasses were fun. I hadn’t recalled that this was actually my third hair week in the last twelve months. Nice to have the chance to look back and see that, if nothing else, I’ve gotten better at capturing value and volume, not just line.

“Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is / to feel lost together.…”

… from “This Again” by Bob Hicok (published November 5, 2023), which begins:

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option.…

I also especially like this poem of Hicok’s, for the final two lines:

…since Jews really are relentless
when it comes to being human.

(And, of course, I love this one, as a fellow Son of Michigan.)

It’s hard not to see every still life as a love story . . . (Sketches of the Week for Week 38 of 2026)

Still lives were an almost inevitable progression after Fruit Week, I suppose. It was nice to move more toward ideal forms, and also juxtaposing the geometrically regular with the aggressively organic (Still Life Week also corresponded with me finishing off the last of the feral pears we swiped from the middle school garden).

My son preferred the two eggs sketch (he found the whole week “very poetic,” but this one spoke to him most. I preferred the lip balm and pear, which really felt more like a portrait of marriage than a still life.

The Rage of the Watermelon (Sketch of the Week for Week 37 of 2026)

“Fruit Faces” was my follow up to Pear Week. Again, there is a lot to be said for “volunteer,” garden, and farmer’s market fruit as reference models; they have much more character than what’s on display at a civilized grocery store.

‘course, now I desperately want to hear a mash-up of Julie London’s version of “Watermelon Man” and basically anything from Rage Against the Machine. Is there an AI 🤖✨ that can poop that out for me real quick? Or perhaps do one of you fancy folks have a musical inclination toward such perversion? If so, please send your artistic jipes and musical tomfoollery to dave@davideriknelson.com

Pear. Perspective. (Sketch of the Week for Week 36 of 202)

I spent all of last week sketching pears, because we had a lot of them (we raided the garden my wife looks after all summer), and because pears that have grown without the benefit of culling and fertilizer and pesticide and proper cultivation are endearing and personable little guys.

Also, tasty.