At the beginning of 2013 I started drawing a lot of celebrities--especially actors, in and out of character. (Pictured above is Taylor Swift.) I think partially I wanted to showcase my ability to capture a likeness; a lot of the portraits in my sketchbook did look a lot like their subjects, but the vast majority of them are from people I'll never see again--I don't even remember most of their names. If I tell you my drawing looks just like that person, you pretty much have to take my word for it.
Another reason, I think, is that I was just getting bored. By this point I had more or less succeeded in making art a habit (in my first couple sketchbook retrospectives I talked about how I wasn't doing that before), which meant that I was getting better at what I was drawing. But what I was drawing was mostly the back and side of people's heads during church. All the men are wearing shirts and ties; the most variation I got with them is that some were wearing jackets and a few had facial hair. The women have a lot more variety in both clothing and hairstyles, but in such a conservative community there are still relatively few acceptable styles. (Compared to, say, sitting down in Central Park and doing sketches of the people there. I've never been to NYC, but if/when I do, my sketches of people will probably be a lot more interesting.) Drawing characters from TV and movies just helped me draw something different.
At this time the first Hobbit movie had just come out, so I went through a Hobbit/Lord of the Rings drawing phase. (This was long before I enough time had passed for me to become disillusioned with the newer trilogy--although I still like them a lot more than I think most people do.)
I was also watching a lot of TV back then (I hardly watch any now):
And here are some characters from The Office, pictured separately only because I forgot to add them to the collection above:
There were some rumors around this time of them making a Zelda movie, so I decided to imagine what a cinematic version of some of the characters would look like. In retrospect, these casting choices are mostly terrible. Guess I shouldn't quit my day job to take a shot at casting.
I gave Samus (from the Metroid series) the same treatment (with similarly questionable casting):
This also marks baby step in my progression toward being more open about the nerdier side of my artwork: I was comfortable enough with myself at this point to put effort into drawing this stuff, but I was still uncomfortable enough that I would try to avoid this section of my sketchbook if certain people (namely, less nerdy people) asked to see my drawings. (I talked about working through my discomfort with this type of artwork here and here.)
Sometimes it's the juxtaposition of drawings on the same page that makes my old sketchbooks interesting, rather than any of the individual drawings in particular:
Well, that got dark. And speaking of dark:
It was always awkward when someone with less appreciation for dark humor stumbled upon these and assumed I was being 100% serious rather than, say, 40% serious. I guess a blog called "Artistential Crisis" wouldn't be complete without some full-blown nihilism sprinkled in.
As I mentioned before, most of my portraits during this time weren't particularly noteworthy compared to the ones I've shared in previous posts. I'll conclude this post with one exception, presented without comment:
