Sketchy Doings

While working on some larger projects I thought I'd take a break to go through some old sketches of mine and show them off to all of you. These are quite the blast from the past for me; I hope you enjoy them as much as I have revisiting them.

This first one is a drawing of my room when I lived in Toronto. The drawing dates from 2005. I was living in a place where I had the entire top floor with a kitchen and a rooftop balcony for only $140 a week, in the heart of the Annex, a very nice section of that city. Had to share a bathroom on the second floor, and some of the other tenants were a handful, but overall it was a great place to live. The landlord lived next door (it was a split building), an elderly polish man whose wife died about a year after I moved in.
The entire place had been all occupied by their family at first, then they started renting rooms first to one friend of the family and eventually the half of the building became an impromptu rooming house. Unfortunately they neglected to register with the city and so eventually the place had to be sold. I lived there for nine years and still stay in touch with my former landlord, he's ninety years old now. Writing this I'm thinking I should give him a call.

I'm pretty sure the model for this turned out to be Merrill Nisker, aka the singer Peaches. It was at a place called the Toronto School of Art on Spadina Ave, where they had a drop in Life Drawing Session in the evening I think on Wednesdays. Hard to remember exactly when I drew this, maybe in '99 or '2000? Anyways she was a model but not an instructor so there was no Teaches of Peaches going on, but she was noticeably outgoing, smiling and looking everyone in the eye, cracking jokes.

This is Charlies, an old Italian Restaurant in my hometown of Kitchener Ontario, across from the bus station on Charles Street. Drew this back sometime in the mid nineties, probably '95. The place has changed hands multiple times since then and a few years back the building was renovated and now houses a bunch of tech startups.

This young lady is Tiff Preney of the Preney Print & Litho family from Windsor, who used to print a large proportion of the comics for the North American market, particularly independents. Eventually Quebecor Media managed to squeeze them out of the market, but Tiff is still a tireless supporter of the comics art, being one of the key organizers of the Toronto Comic Jam for the past several years. Drawn in 2005 on College St, Toronto.

This is Albert, a movie extra on the set of Cinderella Man, back in 2004. I was an extra for a while back then, and that shoot was quite interesting. The boxing scenes were shot in Maple Leaf Gardens, after it had shut down but before the new owners turned it into a Loblaw's or whatever it is now. Most of the guys in the crowd looked like they'd walked straight out of a Dick Tracy strip.
I've spotted myself in a couple of the shots from when they had me sit near the front, but I swear there's a shot of me back in the crowd that I remember: I cupped my hands in front of my face and yelled out, "Giant chunk of hash!" and the guy next to me laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. Look for it!
There's a few more pretty funny stories from that experience, but I think I'll save them for another post - I also want to track down the rest of the sketches I did to go with it, because I did quite a few.

So that's it for now. Looking back I realize that there are a lot of examples of places and events in my life that I managed to capture in sketch form, and while recently I've been shifting more of my focus on writing, seeing these images again reminds me of the power of visual art. And so I think I'll continue to make sketches whenever I find myself in a new or interesting situation; it's like a sort of diary, or maybe a diary prompt for when I choose to share them with descriptions like these. Thanks kindly for taking the time to look at this, and if you've any comments about this process I'd love to read them.