We got to see a local production of the Nutcracker yesterday (some very good friends/neighbor’s daughter was in it). Jack was sitting next to me giving me suggestions about the sketch — until the lights went down and the show began.
The food came before I could draw the man she was talking to.
They learned the first two bars of a Beethoven piano concerto and played it over and over and over and OVER AND OVER again…. Ha. The great part was they were having a good time and were sitting in one place long enough to sketch. At one point, when I was sketching her hand, Lily made her doll play it. Another sketch done standing up.
This is when she wanted to go home to get a pair of pants so she could do “upside-down things”.
I have been working a lot lately, and not drawing for fun as much as I probably should, oh well –for a guy who’s basically freelance, it’s good to be working! So night before last we all went out to the local Mexican restaurant and the girls wrote their names on the backs of their kid’s menus, then came over to my side of the table and asked me to draw them under their names.
I like how Jane had to give me a credit on the bottom of her drawing. It’s funny, too, how she had to use my full name, as opposed to “Dad”. Kids are funny. You can almost make out what’s written on the other side of the paper too. Hopefully I’ll have some time to do some proper sketching here soon.
One of the cats caught a lizard, its tail already missing from a previous feline entanglement. Jack saved it and put it in a plastic bucket. We went to the hiking trail about a mile up the hill and released it back into the wild. The kids discovered sap in a nearby tree and started playing with it, so I sketched them.
Jack took the bucket and put it on his head and asked me to sketch him too!
I was walking past this normal, boring office building this morning, then noticed that the entire back side of it, not even visible from the street, was covered with an amazing vine. It transformed a cement-walled eyesore into a place of mystery. I wanted to explore that little door in the back.
When I first looked up and saw this couple, he was on the cell phone and she was sitting there with that classic, all-too-familiar bored and slightly uncomfortable expression of someone waiting for the other person to get off the phone. By the time I got the sketchbook out, he was off the phone and back with her. So I had to draw what I was looking at. Oh well.
Every day I walk my kids to school and walk back down the tree-lined street and think, “this would make a nice sketch someday”. Well, today was the day! It didn’t take too long — just long enough for my back to complain, standing there, but I kept drawing anyway. Fall leaves were everywhere. I really didn’t do it justice.
Anthony Zierhut 