shawn drawn: End of an epoch: Sketchbook 26

Despite the burden of these beasts, my sketchbooks are damnably hard to fill.

Each takes me more than a year, even though it's my everything — iPad®™, calendar, phone book, shopping list, legal pad, id and superego. Oh, and a place to draw stuff.

Though I don't think twice anymore about drawing in public — though I draw every day — my output is invariably frugal, and blank pages seem to regenerate out the back end. I seem to never reach the back cover.

But somehow I did with Sketchbook 26; it's finally filled, just before the yellow cardstock cover came loose of its spiral binding. It's hard to close flat from months of daily use, so when I close it next, it will be for a long time.

(I know once I said I had three dozen sketchbooks, but I was thinking wishfully …)

Exploring canine styles for a client's greeting card.

Now I have begun with a new book, this one hardbound in black, sturdy and resistant to dings, which I got by pure luck in a two-for-one sale. Commence the slow slog.

Here's an elegy to No. 26, random doodles for paying projects or playing around, which I haven't shown already — or don't plan to show some other way some other day.

Ever since I could draw, people have asked who or what I was drawing. Ninety-eight
percent of the time the answer is, "I don't know." I started from the right eye and
kept going from there. He must really love bread sticks, or whatever those are.

First drawing in Sketchbook No. 26,
for a shelved client project.

Swim friend Doug Bogle spoke once of
seahorses. Seahorses, you say?
as I went home wanting to push
my pencil around.

Captain America-ish figure for an art class
I was teaching. Gotta know how to draw 'em
before I can teach how to draw 'em. Am I right?

Sketch of renowned distance swimmer Martin Strel,
for a possible project.

For swim friend Zane Hodge of Mississippi,
who regales us all with the Mike Fink-magnitude
swimming and running rivalry with Randy Beets.

Storyboard thumbnails for a project I'm trying desperately to
see through to life, something you can hold in your hands.

Sketches for a client poster,
highways as an analogy.

Earlier sketches for the same poster,
highways as a horrific analogy.

A person gets bored. A person gets a Prismacolor©® black pencil and a
fine-tipped black pen, and things happen.

Celtic knots: not easy, I conclude.

Study for a nephew's painting.

It started with the hatted head. The rest is pure speculation.

More from my personal project, the one I'm trying desperately to complete.
It amuses me how my sketchbooks will show the stop-and-start progress
of projects, separated by many pages, some to wither in pencil form. Not this. Not this.