Amdall Gallery

It’s been about seven years since I moved from the ol’ hometown, where I spent the first three decades of my life. During my 20s, I spent a good chunk of that time hanging out with a great group of people. I had a blast with this crew, and have great memories of all the typical “hey we’re finally adults“-type stuff we did. Thinking about these times, I realized I have some good subjects for a series of sketches on friends from my hometown. One fun thing we used to do was play football on the weekends. We didn’t do it every weekend, but when we had enough people we often tried to get something going.

Here’s a drawing of a team I was on, in a huddle during one of these weekend games. I image the conversation went, “okay, everyone run around like crazy until everyone collapses.” I’ve tried not to name art subjects on this site, and I’ll continue that in this series of sketches. I’d say this one turned out pretty decently. Everyone looks more or less accurate. But, as with seemingly so many of my drawings, this one looked best about halfway through it, and I feel like I kind of messed it up as I kept going.

Above, I’ve done another one of those progression .gifs I’ve become so fond of including. For some reason, the .gif quality isn’t all that great. But, at least I remembered to take photos as I went through it! I’m also going to show some static images of how this one evolved. My favorite one might actually be image number three, where I had first started to fill in middle footballer’s shirt. After that, as seen in the final version/image four, I think it got a bit messy.

As I mentioned, this is going to be a series on these cool folks from my hometown. Each sketch is going to have a few different people in them, but there may be some overlap too. I just don’t have a scene to pull from that has all of them together, and I’m afraid if I tried, it would get too busy with more than a small handful of people in it.

So, stay tuned for part two! Coming soon, hopefully. I don’t actually know how many of these I’m going to do, but I’m tentatively planning at least three in this series.