One of my resolutions for 2026 besides a dry January was to get more analogue in life. Over the winter holiday, I retrieved my-started-but-not-finished 100 Days of Drawing journal from my pile of sketchbooks and took up since a couple years ago inking and penciling again.
This sketch of oysters made me remember my brother's birthday of Sweetwater oysters and Hogwash mignonette at Sol Food.
And this drawing exercise of the activities that give me utmost pleasure too is a favorite assignment.
I didn't adhere to the direction to listen to music or an audiobook or talk to a friend (why do I dislike phone conversations?) while sketching. Instead I listened to NPR and copied (yeah I'm more a copyist than a freehand sketcher)an illustration of a mixtape.
The drawing journal next assigns sketching faces. I remember loving to sketch eyes as a junior high student and was trying to recall the instructions for pupils and irises and eyelashes. I remember now! Draw 3 balls or 1 ball atop 2 balls and draw the outline of an eye around the balls before filling in the rest of details of eyelid, eyelines and lashes.
Faces were starting to get tedious.
And the news cycle has been shocking and horrific.
I so want to move on from faces and on to the next exercises of architecture and or more assignments of a still life. There's one last assignment in this section to create my own dots (which means breaking out my watercolor palette) and then ink more faces. And I'm not going to follow the direction or guidance to draw my own face or that of my friends. Let me figure out other parameters. However, for the most part, I like being a student and given assignments.
