Garbage can: I wanted to try out my 'Secret Shoppers' doodle on a soft surface before I tried it on canvas, and I found a garbage can in our garage that worked okay
This work is purposely incomplete. I will facilitate a group of people who will color in the black and white template as well as have the option of making their own art freehand. Individual and couple contributions will be combined to make our composite mural. People who participate in this event will thus listen and speak while creating artwork for the mural. For my part I will explain the latest research concerning the hormones involved in the physiology and neurology of falling in love and remaining in love
And that’s a wrap from this current sketchbook! Closing things with some Peter Falk wisdom I’ve shared before, I think…
“My idea of Heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.”
Imperfect Lines, Honest Presence
This sketch is not perfect—and that’s exactly why it’s alive. The bold figure, the dissolving hat, the tilted chair: all of it feels unfinished, fleeting, caught in motion. It’s what the Japanese call wabi-sabi—finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete.
But there’s something deeper here too. A quick sketch is not just what the eye records. It’s what the soul permits. To draw without fixing, without polishing, is to admit the world will not hold still for us. Life slips past. The lines break off. And yet, somehow, the essence remains.
When you sketch this way, you are not the master of the moment—you are its guest. The pencil does not carve permanence; it pays attention. The act of drawing becomes an act of being present, of honoring what is already vanishing.
So here’s a challenge: grab a pencil and sketch someone near you in sixty seconds. Do not erase. Do not perfect. Let the lines falter. When you finish, ask yourself: What truth did the imperfection reveal?
Perhaps presence itself is the real art.
This drawing was done with pen and colored pencil. I wanted to create a self-portrait that could also serve as a profile picture for my art accounts. My other self-portraits tend to be realistic, so I decided to try and depict myself in my own illustrative style instead. My artistic influences for this piece include tattoo styles, pinup art, and art nouveau as well as inspiration taken from some of my favorite portrait artists, Sargent and Rockwell.
This is a digital rendering of a drawing I have recreated several times. The original was a doodle done in high school and has since been done as a painting, a tattoo design, and now as digital art. My inspiration was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', classic cartoons (Woody the Woodpecker), and pinup art styles.
