Sketches and Doodles

by Andrew K. Dart

If I had something to say by way of introduction, I would say it here.  The latest additions are at the bottom of the page. The sketches on this page are shown approximately actual size, at least on my monitor. A hand like this one was on the cover of a religious tract.  I made a sketch of it one day in church.  Of course I was still paying attention to the sermon. This is the Indian on an Indian head test pattern. This is an angry and deeply disillusioned young gorilla. It's a barn and a tree. This is patterned after one of the illustrations in a book about calligraphy. This gorilla is deep in thought. As deep as a gorilla goes, anyway. Once in a while I dabble with color.  The results are disappointing. This is somewhat similar to a man who was featured in a book about drawing cartoons. This guy was in the same book.  Looks like I completely cut off one ear, because the shadow doesn't account for the parts that are missing. This is a recurring theme.  Individual cartoon items are easy to draw.  As you can probably tell, the bag on the left was drawn on a legal pad. Erwin Schrödinger. The inside of an analog panel meter. Part of a telephone. The back corner of somebody's basement. Flashback to my days at the Channel 5 transmitter site. It's a lighthouse. This was done with pencils and was abandoned halfway through.  Pencils lack the precision of ultra-fine pens and they just have an indistinct and unresponsive feel, in the hands of a control freak. Palm trees are easy to draw. This is a simplistic diagram of a Beverage antenna. Figure it out. Paint brush. Dinosaur skeleton. Trash can. How to put on a wire nut.  This was patterned after an illustration I saw in a book about how to specify things in a hardware store. It took all day to draw all these masses of parallel lines.  But at least my time wasn't wasted. A kid in a tree house. This is a disgruntled old man who suffers from chronic low-level depression and professional burnout.  He lives with decades of bottled-up frustration and resentment.  But as long as he wears a silk tie and a starched shirt to work, who can tell? Some kind of animal track in the dirt. This is all I know about oil exploration. This is an 8th-grade P.E. coach, who has a brain the size of a walnut, yet he also teaches math. Self-portraits. Possibly another self-portrait. A cartoony hand. A worn-out shoe. Another mass of tiny parallel lines of varying thicknesses. This was an attempt to draw an illustration I saw in a book about anatomy for artists. This hand was in the same book, as I recall. I don't know what's in room 637, but I'm not going in there. I was drawing a music stand but I couldn't see the base from where I was sitting.  So I substituted a bucket of concrete. Updated 8/23/2007: Additional material These two drawings were made about four years ago using a Uni-Ball Micro, rather than the tinier pens that I used these days. Magnetic recording heads, of course. These two were some of my first drawings using super-fine pens.  They were photographed rather than scanned, but they're on roughly the same scale. These two were drawn on card stock.  More recently I have begun to use 32-pound "resume paper" which is somewhat rigid and has a slightly rough texture. Updated 12/11/2007: I've heard rumors that at least two people visited this page recently and spent more than five minutes looking at these drawings.  So naturally, I'm inclined to add a few more. These are illustrations from my new book about coaxial cable and shovels. Two recurring and conflicting themes:  Well defined geometric shapes and meaningless blobs. I don't know what this is, and neither do you, so stop guessing. Recently color has been added, but nothing seems to happen when the colors hit the paper. Nothing.  These drawings, were made with a series of extremely small dots that in some cases are less than one pixel in size, so there's some loss of detail here, unless you have a really huge display. Here's what you were missing. This is considerably larger than actual size. This is a rare item:  An illustration I drew with an application in mind.  I needed a picture of a compact fluorescent light bulb to accompany this page.  Then, to protect my valuable intellectual property and original creative works, I used Photoshop to add a not-too-subtle brand along one side. In this case, as I drew a series of parallel lines, each line varied in intensity approximating the previous line.  The waves that resulted were amusing, and the finished product was used as a background at the top of this page. When I attempted to convert this system from rectangular to polar form, the results were disappointing. Sometimes I just scratch at the paper while waiting for something to pop up.  If nothing spectacular develops, this is the result. Everyone has nightmares about guitar lessons from time to time... right? A dejected, humiliated and defeated young gorilla. Jellyfish Carrot Semaphore Sketch 681 Sketch 682 Sketch 683 Sketch 684 Sketch 685 Sketch 686 This is my crude imitation of a drawing by Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist of the late 19th century.  The invention of the elephant and donkey to symbolize the Republican and Democratic parties, as well as Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, have been attributed to Mr. Nast. Sketch 687 Updated 8/27/2009: Self-portrait of a man who is about to lose a game of Scrabble.  (Drawn on the corner of a Scrabble score sheet.) Before I get in any trouble, I should mention that Scrabble is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. Sketch 691 Illustrations I saw in a dictionary: Chariot Clamp Diskus Illustrations I saw in various books about drawing: Sketch 698 Sketch 703 Sketch 704 More legal pad scribbling: Sketch 701 Sketch 702 Looks vaguely like Spiro Agnew and a Shure 52A More sketches from the margins of my Sunday School notes: Sketch 721 Sketch 722 Sketch 723 Sketch 724 Sketch 725 Sketch 726 Sketch 727 Sketch 728 Sketch 729 Sketch 730 Sketch 732 Sketch 733 Sketch 734 Sketch 736 Sketch 737 Sketch 740 Sketch 741 Sketch 742 Sketch 743 Sketch 744 Updated 5/21/2010: Sketch 752 I saw this illustration in a dictionary and tried to reproduce it. Sketch 753 Sketch 754 This is one of those meaningless blobs for which I am so famous. Sketch 755 These two axe-heads were featured in some book I saw -- probably a dictionary. Sketch 756 Too often, this is all I come up with when I sit down to draw. Sketch 757 Updated 12/17/2010: Sketch 761 I was digging through my big pile of stuff yesterday when I came across some Sunday School notes from 10/17/2004.  I must have just started drawing hands and arms.  Primitive. Updated 2/7/2011: Sketch 763 I was toying with the idea of using one-farad capacitors in place of lead-acid storage batteries in a solar power system. Sketch 764 I must be in a slump.  This is the artistic equivalent of incoherent rambling. Sketch 765 Whatever this is, it's all broken and corroded. Sketch 766 I got bored and started trying to reproduce some of the illustrations in an old dictionary:  A flatiron and a gauntlet.  The third part is supposed to be turbulent water flowing out of a pipe, and the bottom part is an illustration from Physics 101. Sketch 767 A cleat. Sketch 768 A hammer. Sketch 769 A side of pork. Updated 2/11/2011: Here are a few others that were scanned years ago but never included on this page. Ethanol Used as an illustration on this page. Sketch 641 This was one of my first sketches, and I thought it was already on this page, but just realized this week that it wasn't. Schematic One of the illustrations for this page. Sketch 650 Unless you like vacuum tubes, you probably don't read many books that include the phrase, "Make no contact in stippled region."  But I do. Sketch 656 Close-up shows this could have kept expanding for days, but was probably interrupted by lunch and abandoned thereafter. Sketch 658 Close-up available here, showing that I must have spent hours scraping at this paper with no organized intentions. Sketch 2001 Close-up available here, a typical hour's output while scribbling at work.  In this case, I was in the Master Control Room watching This Week in Baseball and getting ready to roll in the local breaks in a baseball game.  The paper is the format sheet for TWIB, showing the local break times.  The last local break ran at 2:58:19 p.m. Central time, and ended at exactly 3:00 p.m.  That's slightly off-topic, but that's what was going on while I was doodling. Sketch 2002 More of the same. Sketch 2003 My sketches aren't that great, really, but I make it up in volume.

Document location http://www.akdart.com/sketches/ Updated December 17, 2011. Page design by Andrew K. Dart  ©2011