Sketchbook

I have no intentions of turning this into an all art blog, all the time, but this is what I've got right now, people.

I've never been very good at keeping a sketchbook. Unlike journals, which I am fairly consistent with, I can never keep up with filling a book with drawings. I've always wanted to do one of those drawing journals, you know, chronicling some journey I go on, or sketching the people I passed at the outdoor market. If I went to an outdoor market.

I've tried several times, buying fresh sketchbooks every year or so, with grand plans on chronicling my life. Or at least doing some fantastic figure studies, so my sketchbook will be as exciting to peruse as that of Leonardo DaVinci.

Yeah, not so much. I tend to do my best sketches on scraps of paper when I'm supposed to be doing something else. However, I do have a small 5x7ish sketchbook that I actually managed to partially fill over a few years.

I dug it out the other day, so that I could do this sketch:


It is one of the reference pics I was sent for the portrait series I just finished. I thought it was way too cute not to draw...plus it includes the Grandpa that commissioned all the pictures!
Anyway, while I had the sketchbook out, I got to looking through it, and found that it really did chronicle a small bit of my life- approximately 1999-2002 . Lets see what I found.

I had drawn a few portraits of my teachers before I moved out of my hometown (Coincidentally, the man holding the baby was also a teacher of mine) :



I also had a few sketches of my siblings, which I planned on using for studies for later paintings (which would include different people):

The painting created from this was supposed to be in the style of Georges de Latour's Repentant Magdalene paintings.

Thain...a lot younger.

When I started taking the Bainbridge ferry to work every day in December of 2001, I thought it would be brilliant to sketch people and things on each trip. That lasted about a week....when I realized a half hour ferry ride was the perfect place to take a nap. So most of these are from the first week, and then a few from the very end of that year before I moved to Seattle proper. We rode the commuter ferry- which means it was during the hours that it was completely full of business people going to and from work.

My Uncle rode with me most everyday. He slept a lot. This is him, and some random lady.

Uncle's face close up. He looks like Mr. Bean in this drawing.

Uncle reading important work papers. (He was the VP of Human Resources.)


My pants are the plaid ones. They weren't as cool I wish they were.


One of our friends from church, and a lady with whom my Uncle had been riding the ferry for years. Her husband was on our bench I think.

Lots of busy people going home. I like this one, and wish I had more like it.


Maybe a late night ferry- because there are young people, and its not very full.

I did one or two drawings chronicling my work place. I wish I'd done more of these too, because in the three plus years I worked there, my work station moved several times, and everything continually changed...mostly because of our being taken over by another business, and our corporate headquarters slowly shrinking.

This was my first work area at Airborne Express.




And this is from the two horrible weeks I had to work in the collections department. I had a paper cut. I think they were trying to be nice to me, because it was a higher level department than where I was working before. But I was so miserable there, I was ecstatic when I got to go back to my old duties!

I regret all the things I didn't catch in my sketchbook: late night busses through downtown, the Seattle Center where the Space Needle is, observation decks looking out on Puget Sound, my coworkers. But I'm glad to have at least these few memories recorded.