Sketchbook Searches

Sometimes, when nothing strikes my imagination, when a motto I use--"just paint something"--doesn't even work, I go to to a stack of old sketchbooks for inspiration. A lot of the stuff in those books is more like musing in images rather than any kind of finished idea. Sometimes there's nothing at all to see, and sometimes a forgotten sketch, or scrawl, strikes a spark. Once in a while it's a good practice to leaf through the old books. You never know.

Here are a few sketches, done mostly in graphite. The first is a page of thumbnail sketches I did for an assignment. The idea was that we see blue car with the engine running at our gas station and a masked man with his hand in his pocket emerges. Trying to figure out composition, values and so on was a useful exercise. The painting has yet to be made, if ever.

The next sketches are from a small series intended as studies for an oil painting. Again, the painting hasn't resulted, but the sketches were interesting enough in themselves to keep. The top is the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, and the bottom is a small bridge in the same city. Now that I look at the lower image again, I'm again considering that painting.

The delicate beauty of this young woman attracted me immediately when  I did the sketch, but somehow it got shuffled into the sketchbook along with a number of other sketches, only to be found not long ago and scanned. The sidelong gaze and shimmer in her eyes made her innocence and questioning expression compelling.  This is a 5.5x8.5 sketchbook page.

That isn't quite the case with this female whom I sketched around the same time. In this case, she is a character in a movie set about a century ago; hence the hairstyle. But this young woman's character is considerably less innocent and considerably more calculating, which was what drove me to sketch her and the look on her face. This is also about 5x8.

The last drawing for today is a sketch of one of my models, done quickly on copier paper with a number 2 pencil. Many sketches like this wind up in the circular file. I kept this one because I liked the expression and the tilt of her head. As is easy to see, this one was hasty and was never cleaned up.