New Year, New Monster

My first sketchbook page of the year. (Earliest prototype seen here.)

Beans

My favorite things that come in cans.

Of course, old-fashioned beans are good when soaked and boiled and gussied up with a recipe, but I like modern beans, too. Canned beans--the kind best spooned out straight from the can. Such beans are a friend to lumberjacks, cowboys, and campers everywhere. And librarians such as myself

I wonder how beans would taste inside a sandwich? Clearly this calls for an experiment.

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?

Hurrah, Hooroo!

Today's a celebration sort of day.

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.

Snaggletooth

Last weekend my favorite companion took me to the lake at Fort Sheridan. We wanted to rest, but as soon as we sat down my red litho crayon insisted on conquering the beach.

Brave crayon!

Now give us a beach smile.

If you squint, doesn't it actually look like a smile?

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.

Three Feet

I've been drawing a lot of feet lately. This one has plenty of creases and wrinkles because I love to draw those things:

Why feet? Maybe it's because Kevin left me this comment last week: "HEY A PRETTY GOOD WEBSITE BUT I THINK YOU SHOULD MAYBE DRAW SOME OTHER BODY PARTS TOO LIKE LEGS OR ARMS OR SOMETHIN [sic]"

Incidentally, here is this week's motto:
 

Coming up: a gift, a case study, some of my favorite things, and a profession most admirable.

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.