Feral Flowers (Sketches of the Week for Week 31 of 2026)

Three sketches of flowers done in graphite and watercolor pencil. Each flower has been made to look more feral. The top is wild sweet pea flowers, the middle is a a hops leaf, and the bottom is an attacking lily

The title sorta says it all: much like the last couple weeks of clownification were about sketching portraits and then clownifying them, this was sketching plants and then emphasizing how damn threatening many plants look.

I’m not gonna say I’m super happy with any of these—my journal paper is a god-awful medium for watercolor, among other issues—but it was nice to go back to experimenting with other media after several years focused almost exclusively on sketching in pencil with a little ink thrown in.

Also, I like the vibe with the lily at the bottom. A lily is a hella scary flower, when you really give it a good look.

Further clownification (Sketch of the Week for Week 30 of 2026)

A "clownified" sketch of a young woman.

One of the benefits of clownification is that it helps me chill out about trying to sketch attractive people. When I go to sketch someone who is actually good looking, I generally make myself miserable worrying that it will turn out grotesque, and thus guarantee it turns out absolutely grotesque. Meanwhile, if I go into a sketch knowing I’m just going to paint on grotesquery, it’s a lot easier to chill out about the base sketch, and end up with a suitable approximation of a normally attractive human.

My son liked the above clown because it was the clearest and most legible at a glance. I preferred this one, as it most competently combined the vibe of the reference photo and the Das Unheimliche of the clownification:

A pencil sketch of a cute girl, clownified.

Meanwhile, my daughter requested I do a sketch of our dog Schnitzel:

Sketch of a schnauzer, clownified.

I like that he brings a certain gravity to his role of clown and light-bringer to these benighted and uncertain times.

clownification i (Sketch of the Week for Week 29 of 2026)

pencil sketch of a terrified and appalled young woman, but she's also a clown

Long story, but I got a notion into my head to start taking a stab (ha!) at “clownification” this week: picking a normal reference photo, sketching it “straight” for 5 to 10 minutes, and then taking the next 5 to 10 minutes to “clownify” it. This is an admittedly weird as hell thing to do, but I’m gonna suggest it as an exercise: There is something about drawing what you see, and then adding to it things that you don’t see but know how they would look applied to that form, which really helps you improve your sense of the contours of the underlying model and how it all pieces together.

BONUS CLOWN: My son really liked the “vibes” on this sketch:

A sketch of Willem Dafoe, clownified.

I sorta felt like it was cheating, as the initial reference pic was of Willem Dafoe and was already hella creepy with no further effort from me:

Photo of Willem Dafoe looking the creepy.

Clouds and Tower; Hand and Eye; Stone and Surf (Sketches of the Week for Week 28 of 2026)

We’re caught downwind of forest fires in the Upper Midwest and Canada, and thus experiencing some of the worst air quality on earth (literally) here in Ann Arbor right now. The smoke is at ground level, where it shifts like fog. Everything smells like someone is BBQing over a dumpster fire, and the sun looks like a searing, distant bike-reflector at the back of a shed occupied by a chain-smoking blacksmith. Walking outside for more than 15 minutes, even in a respirator, gives you a headache and your eyes itch.

Last week I was kayaking around the Apostle Islands, which was dangerous and terrifying in its own special way, but way better than this. So I’m thinking about that. The above sketches are from that trip, as are the below pics.

FYI: in this last picture, that’s fog, not smoke—which was still terrifying, because we were in kayaks, and Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world, and you can get hypothermia from falling in it in the summer, but still not so bad as this garbage air that has me and the dogs trapped indoors.

I’m a frayed knot (Sketch of the Week for Week 25 of 2026)

A pencil sketch of a figure made of a knotted hair tie. The lil guy looks like he's straight-jacketed, standing on a desolate plain

Last week was all sketches of knotted string, which were largely boring, and so steadily edged their way into being compositionally surreal. I wasn’t going to post this week, but this lil guy kept striking me with how poignant he was, trapped and bound on a desolate plain. I’m sure this means nothing. Carry on.

See also:

A string walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, we don’t serve strings in here!” So he goes back out, loops his neck into itself, musses up his hair and goes back in. The bartender says, “Hey, aren’t you that string I just kicked out of here?” The string says, “No, I’m a frayed knot!”

[old joke; source of this version]

A Regal Bird (Sketch of the Week for Week 23 of 2026)

A pencil sketch of Henry the 8th, if he'd been an American blue jay instead of a fat British dude.

It was another week focused on fanciful compositions, this time fixated on blue jays (there is one haunting my backyard, where I’m increasingly working now that Michigan is favoring high-heat/high-humidity days. Also, I finally finished patching my fence and mounting gates, thus making the yard safe for the dogs to wander and amuse themselves rather than kvetch at me all afternoon because they are bored and disagreeable).

Anyway, this sketch started in this direction because I had a reference photo of a blue jay that made the lil fella look quite regal and blue jays naturally have a Henry the 8th chin-beard. But I ended up liking it because the royal bird wound up looking sorta shell-shocked, like the enormity of his power and responsibility had just dawned on him.

Moonset, Lake Michigan, 1994 (Sketch of the Week for Week 22 of 2026)

A pencil sketch of the moon setting over Lake Michigan

All last week was dedicated to creative composition—drawing what was in my head (often using references pics for individual elements) rather than just trying to recreate what I saw. I liked this moonset landscape most, although my son preferred these two (“Shall Not Pass” and “Atlas Ignored”)

A pencil sketch of a lone picket blocking the path of an invading snail
A sketch of a colossal man holding a huge orb aloft, his labors entirely ignored by the puny little humans going about their lives below