I started sketching this man during our flight because I loved his profile. Then a flight attendant came over to him and said, “Would it be all right if I told them who you are?” to which he nodded yes. She then announced over the P.A. that “we have an aviation hero on the plane, Gail Halvorsen.” He was even featured in the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. Here’s his Wikipedia page. Very interesting.
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.
Joan organized a Holiday Boutique at the kids’ elementary school and the big event was this afternoon. Lily helped out at the button booth, making those buttons that you can pin on your shirt. Here she is working the machine. The kids in the foreground are a couple red-head boys drawing their designs to be pressed into a button. No, I didn’t make a mistake, she has actually dyed her hair green!
This is the button she made for me. I think it’s me and Joan in front of a Christmas tree. The faces are stickers she had.
The event. Joan is the woman in the middle of the picture, and yes, that’s Lily in the foreground.
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.
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.
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.
She owns the restaurant we go to for lunch sometimes. This was the first time I’d seen her stop moving long enough to be sketched.
Anthony Zierhut 
