Quick Sharpie sketch of Dakota Frost, based on the model from the BLOOD ROCK / LIQUID FIRE covers. I tried to do this upside down at first, to "see" it better, and OH BOY it did not turn out well - the landscape was all off. So this is an even quicker sketch, because I need to get to bed early.
Also, Camp Nano only got ~150 added words, but again, I need sleep. Rough draftiness:
“Your voice,” the priest said, taking another step back. “If not a vampire, surely … surely not a werewolf … but your voice … why do I know your voice?”
I spun, rolling my neck, unfurling more vines into a soft green halo that lit my face.
“Do you know me now?” I asked.
“Oh … God,” the priest said. “You were on the news, the mother of that weretiger—”
“That I am, and if she is here,” I said, “you should point the way … then run.”
“She … here?” The priest blinked, then his eyes flicked at the coffin. “But it’s not—”
My heart fell. The prisoner in the coffin was not Cinnamon—but as the priest’ eyes went wide in terror, I realized that in his shock he’d given away there was a prisoner in that coffin. I drew a breath, my face flushing, feeling my blood pounding in my ears.
Hopefully I'll pick up speed now that I'm out of the Lenten "Jesus and Godel" series. I wrote 45,000 words of nonfiction in Lent, which is nowhere near the needed Nano rate, but I think is probably the fastest rate and largest single body of nonfiction writing I've done since perhaps my thesis.
But what I really did today was move boxes into the room that's going to become my wife's art studio.
Drawing, writing, moving every day.
-the Centaur
Character study for a Dakota Frost picture, inks on vellum over a roughs with inks and blue on Strathmore 11x14. Required some Photoshop surgery as I didn't anticipate how the shading would riff off the hair and make it look like the model had a beard. Compared to the original, the forehead is too high and the nose too large. Back to practicing, sigh. I think the below is from the Peles Salon Instagram, though I actually found this picture from like 1,000 different Pinterest boards.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
P.S. Got 600+ words on Camp Nano. Picking up speed, more in a bit. 
Aborted character study from the Lace and Steel box cover I did with a Sharpie. I think the drawing is improved, but the composition that I originally did straight on the box is too hard to work with. Better to start over with something that I can use to show off the various parts of the drawing like the rapier and the weird double-bladed fan/shield/thingy. This composition, of course, was totally off-the-cuff:
Based on the Lace and Steel RPG character book cover: you can see the inspiration, but the off-the-cuff composition was too slavish in recreating some of the elements. I need to start over with a wholly new composition to get the effect I want with this drawing.
Apparently you can buy Lace and Steel 
Quick Sharpie sketch, sans roughs, of Peter Capaldi's eyebrows.
Not terrible, but still needs work - the eyebrows are more angled in the realz, and the eyes are more round, and there are subtleties to the hair and temple that need work.
Nevertheless, drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
G. K. Chesterton. Got the landscape of the face a bit off, down and a bit twisted; I guess I didn't really believe he had that much of a double chin. (The error is even more obvious mirror-reflected; time to start drawing these sketches upside-down again).
It's really hard to do these quick sketches with no roughs, but doing so is forcing me to pay close attention to what I'm doing and to plan ahead, even on a blank canvas with few to no guidelines (I did draw a box, cropped out of this picture).
Still, drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Quick sketch of PKD. His face got a bit distorted, but it's not terrible, methinks.
Also, I did the following sketch on a box of the roleplaying game Lace and Steel, which is "centaurs and friends in the age of the Three Musketeers." I'd lost the original box somehow - I seem to recall it being mis-sized or having something wrong with the cover - and the generic white box was easy to lose in the shelves. So I quickly flipped through the character book - AMAZING art by Donna Barr, as I recall - and drew, without roughs, the following character on the cover of the white box, so I could find it later:
Quick Sharpie sketch of Richard Dedekind. I think I squished him a little, and with the Sharpies it's hard to get eyes pointed right. And his neck kind of stretched down a bit on the left. But I'm not super unhappy with this one. And it means I get to bed 30 minutes earlier than otherwise expected.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Quick sketch of Tony Stark as Iron Man. In an interesting reversal, I think the picture below looks a little squashed, and I unconsciously stretched his face back up to a more normal proportion. Actually, this one wasn't totally terrible - I had to learn a language for drawing the hair, and to pick which parts of the drawing I was going to render as pure black. Also, contra my earlier suggestions, the Sharpie wasn't totally permanent; I actually used whiteout to fix one overwritten line - can you tell where?
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Still stuck on Sharpie drawings while I am simultaneously (a) doing a Lenten series (b) unpacking my library as it is shipped from California and (c) dealing with end-of-quarter objectives ("OKRs"). Above is a drawing of Saint Stephens in-the-Field as set up for Good Friday Vigil: I deliberately simplified it as there's no point in doing a super-detailed drawing when you're trying to do it super-quick. Still, I discovered, as I was drawing the simple shapes of the Cross, something I've suspected: my lines have a wobble to them. This could be practice, or it could be a lingering side effect of my serious RSI episode in the late '90's, which I am still managing to this day (typing this on a lowered keyboard tray as we speak).
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Quick Sharpie sketch of a scene from Ghost in the Shell. Man, it is hard doing this when every line that lands has landed forever - the landscape and proportions of the features are so hard to get right.
Still, drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
John Dee, again with the Sharpie sketches. I like the layout of the face better this time, but while it gives me practice on overall shapes, the resolution of the Sharpies is so broad that it makes it impossible to do a good rendering. So that which makes it easy to do a drawing makes it hard to do it right.
Still, drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Quick Sharpie sketch of the Emperor Tiberius. Eh, meh: forehead's too big, and the whole Sharpie sketch thing, while it forces you to commit and gives you practice, is nevertheless a technique which makes it hard to get the shapes quite right. But, hey, it is quick, and it got me to bed earlier.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Sharpie sketch of Fred Rogers. Meh - it was too hard to recover from a few small errors to make the face really look like him, even though the overall face landscape isn't too terrible.
Still, it's before 3:30am, and I'm drawing every day, 30 minutes earlier this time.
-the Centaur 
No-regrets Sharpie sketch of Mahatma Gandhi. Actually, some regrets, in that the no-roughs state of the quick sketch sometimes creates problems - like, his egg is more head shaped, scratch that, reverse it, and his smile lines cup more to the chin, and the mustache doesn't overlap enough with the nose.
Ah well.
But even if it's late and I'm tired, I'm still ... drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Quick Sharpie sketch of the friend from high school mentioned in the last blogpost. Image and name withheld as he is apparently not a public figure, but nonetheless [your name "greenville"] found them anyway. The sketch is ... okay. A little cartoony - the real person's jaw is a bit rounder.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Super quick sketch of Kelthani, an alien character from the "Alliance" universe of my "Stranded" and "Sibling Rivalry" stories. Fun fact: Serendipity the Centaur in "Stranded" is named after Kelthani (her middle name is Keltanya). The barely visible tattoo is the first three letters of "USMC", because Kelthani is literally a U. S. Marine drill instructor born in Darlington, South Carolina ... about 500 years from now.
And yes, he can probably kick your ass. He was a Marine for 300 years.
Done to celebrate finishing a notebook and switching back to an older (like, 20 years older) notebook with blank pages that features Kelthani quite a bit. Sharpie sketch right over very light roughs, trying to reconstruct his bone structure from memory, cleaned up in Photoshop with the levels tool.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
A quick sketch of Bishop Lucinda Ashby, done by roughing in ink and then tracing over my own roughs. I'm not going to share the source image - it was from a Zoom call, and I don't have permission to share - but comparing to a published picture of Lucinda, it's clear I dented her face a little bit. :-(
Ah, well. Sorry, Rev. Lucinda. Still ... drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
A no-regrets Sharpie sketch of Epicurus, from the following bust, allegedly of Epicurus.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Semi-quick sketch of David Hilbert. Face is a bit squnched to one side, and I could have put in more work on the wrinkles. But frankly, the original picture is dark enough under that hat that it's hard to interpret, and it's late and I'm tired, so I just went with it instead. More tomorrow.
Quick sketch of Susan Francis. The head angle ain't bad, and the eyes aren't as oversized, but I'm still doing something wrong with the overall face landscape. Perhaps time to return to drawing the roughs upside down, or perhaps a few tracing exercises to help tune my perception of face feature sizes. Oh, and also, I think her hair got dented in the upper right, now that I look at it one more time. This was just a misstep of that particular hair feature - I intended it to go further out, but just gaffed it.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur