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.
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.
Work has been in crazy deadline mode again – Saturdays, Sundays, late nights, etc., etc.; so I’ve been lax about sketching unfortunately. (My goal is to be able to draw and post something day. Slowly but surely I’ll do it!) These sketches are from a little while back. I was pretending to take notes, but really I was drawing the speakers. I think it gets weird if someone knows you’re sketching them, so if I think they’re on to me I try to pretend I’m looking at something else and steal glances back at my subject. Sometimes I just have to give up the sketch.
I usually don’t mind people watching me draw, though: as a teenager in Texas I had a job as an amusement park caricature artist, with people standing behind me, watching and occasionally even commenting on my work. That seemed to cure me of getting too self conscious about being watched drawing. Besides, I think there’s something fun about watching somebody else draw, and see their thought processes – always different than your own.
I love my local barber shop. It’s like something out of the 1940s. There is a plethora of visual stimuli to keep a pencil busy until one is called to sit in the big chair.
This fellow was nodding off as he was being worked upon.
After a tiring day of helping Joan put up Halloween decorations and recovering (still) from my thrown-out back, I started to sketch another Buddha — coming down to the home stretch on that series — when I turned around and saw the entire family reading quietly in our bed. The Buddha picture wasn’t coming out that well, and this looked more interesting anyway, so I started on the right side, making my way over left. Unfortunately the youngest one nodded off before I got to her. The girl’s are reading novels and the boy is reading a comic book.
The local elementary school was having a car wash fund-raiser. My car was the last one they let in (whew!). All the kids were swarming around it trying to get it done so they could go home. Of course a water fight broke out when they were done, with much screaming and giggling. My car hadn’t been washed since the Big Sur campout nearly two months ago! A well needed cleaning. They worked so fast I hardly had time to sketch them.
My back went out Saturday (ouch!), and is only slowly getting better. Luckily the work deadline was met, but now I’m on my back in bed for the second day in a row. I think I’m driving my wife crazy, not being able to do my usual chores though. This sketch was funny – a drawing within a drawing within a drawing… ha.
Anthony Zierhut 