Amdall Gallery

Continuing on with my “hometown series” of sketches, here’s part two. In the first drawing, I included a few of the guys I used to play football with. It feels like it wasn’t very long ago, but we are closer to measuring that as a decade ago than just a handful of years! Part two features a couple of buddies from the hometown chatting about something sophisticated, if their clothes are any indication. As with the other posts, I won’t include actual names, but the guy on the left also lives elsewhere in the country nowadays. You may recognize the guy on the right from the football huddle sketch.

This one turned out decently, but I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first one in this series. Left-side buddy has a resemblance to the real guy, but is not entirely on point. Something is not exactly right, and I think it might be the mouth/chin area. I’m not completely sold on the perspective either; these guys are around the same height in real life, but the viewing angle I was going for kind of flipped that around. I think it’s technically sound on the perspective, but first glance makes me think, “why is he so much taller?” Also, I believe I made the suit coat too big or too puffed out. I was going for an open jacket effect, but it doesn’t look quite right to me.

So, not a bad second effort! Flawed yes, but it’ll work. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a decent amount of progression photos as I did this one, so my .gif for this one is shorter. Here’s the animation over the course of the sketch:

I definitely have one more of these on tap, and I’d like to keep going because it’s a fun and sort of fresh idea for subjects. The primary snag is I don’t actually have that many photos to reference of these guys. I’ve got some, but a decent portion of my 20s pre-dated the time of high quality, always-present cameras (the smartphone era). It seems like a bunch of my supply came from those old wind-up disposable 35mm cameras, and many aren’t even digitized.

The image in this post is fortunately digital and easy to find, because it was from my wedding, but I’ll have to dig deep for more. I have a large plastic bin with my old printed photos, so I’ll have to dive into it and see what else I can use as inspiration. My favorites to sketch usually involve subjects who aren’t looking at the camera, but most people prefer to pose for photos.

I’ll be back with part three, and hopefully more, soon!