Evening thunderstorm

Today is sultry, muggy, and warm. I've been eating cold sandwiches and making smoothies and refilling my water glass all day.

B. T.

In purplish pencil he is peaceful:

In pen he has a gloomier cast:

Here is another drawing of the same subject in a very cross mood.

Three faces

From my last drawing book:

From my drawing book now:

Another sort of book entirely:

Would you tell your secrets to a man with this mustache?

Tasty meat

I started a new drawing book last week. Here's my first portrait, inspired by a photograph:

"That's Sergei!" my dad exclaimed when I showed him the photograph.

"I remember him," my sister Natasha said. "He's the man who smells like--"

"Meat." Oksana finished for her. "I don't think he washed very often."

"Yes, but he smelled good," Natasha said, clearly sensitive to the absent Sergei's feelings. "He smelled like tasty meat."

Gag me with a spoon. Can you think of a better title for this portrait than Tasty Meat Man? I wish I could.

June is almost, almost here. I want to return to portraits this coming month. I started this blog as a way of chronicling my weekly drawings, but slowly I got caught up in other wonderful things. (Sandwich-making, cake-baking, flower-picking, and bird-watching--to name a few.) I'm going to try to stick to drawings for a while.

Since I just started a new drawing book, tomorrow (or the next day) I'll show you my old book in review. Pages I didn't manage to post here as well as drawings from before I began blogging.

Snarks

This one's called I'm Feeling Cross.

Because I am a little. I have a headache brewing.

In keeping with today's color scheme:

I took this picture at the Garfield Park Conservatory last weekend. The koi live in a pond in the Fern Room and are under constant observation by visitors. I snapped a few shots, but the mouth of the pond was so crowded that we didn't get to linger.

I loved the soft sound of trickling water and the warm, loamy smell in that room. I imagine it is cool and dark and quiet below the surface of the pond. We sat on a bench and just listened and breathed for a while. It was so peaceful. Then we returned to the Palm House, where I made a discovery.

I saw a Boojum Tree.

Did you know that a Boojum is the most dangerous kind of Snark there is, and that the sight of one will make you disappear?

"It's a Boojum!" I cried in unconscious imitation of the Baker in Lewis Carroll's poem. Luckily, the Baker's fate did not befall me, for the tree was not an actual Boojum.

Thank goodness.

(If you don't know much about Snarks, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits will enlighten you. Here it is, if you're interested. One of my favorite poems.)

Eyebrows

This childhood image shows me as I was for many years: without eyebrows.

Maybe that's why I like to draw 'em so much now. I really enjoyed drawing this luxurious pair, for instance:

Isn't it nice how they swirl across his forehead?

I'm going to Chicago this weekend, Reader. I won't be back until Wednesday. In the meantime, please enjoy this triumvirate of pastes from my bathroom:

The middle tube works the best.

Banana pact

Long ago my brother and sister formed a pact which forbade them ever to utter the word banana again.

"Oksana, would you like a banana?"
"You mean a curved yellow fruit? Yes."

I hope you like them ever so ripe.

Welcome to my blog

I love to draw all kinds of things, but lately I've been focusing on portraits. Faces are beautiful; they challenge me. Sometimes when I'm trying to draw my own portrait and it's going badly, I turn it into a picture of a man. So here's today's Man Version of myself:

My favorite description of a face in literature is from Willa Cather's The Professor's House:

His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted beard. His pale eyes and fawn-coloured eyebrows were outbalanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard. The lips had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them rather than with them. He seemed painfully conscious of them.

Whose mouth is this? It's Robert Crane's--a timid physics professor whose lips are as formless as his character. Someday I must draw him.