BETTER EMBARRASSING THAN BORING
SKETCH BOOK
If you can do it, it’s not art. And if you can’t do it, it’s certainly not art.
If you can do it, it's no big deal. And if you can't, it's certainly no big deal.
April 2026 – When pictures first started moving... Set a drawing as the starting image, type in a few lines of prompts, and voilà—you’ve got a moving result. It looks amazing, but it’s about as creative as peeling potatoes.
In the Ides of March 2026—Easter is coming soon. So it’s the perfect time to explore post-apocalyptic, dystopian worlds through drawing. As an emotional counterbalance to the cozy, traditional fun of dyeing eggs. Of course, I’ll be doing that, too. You can find the masterpieces of contemporary egg art under the menu item Laser.
August 2026 – Three months without drawing anything. Of course, that comes back to bite you. You don’t really get much worse, but you certainly don’t get any faster either. Au contraire!
April 2026 – Learning from the Best. Hans Baldung Grien (1484–1545). The painting is titled *Lucretia*, dated 1520. That was quite a few years ago. – The beautiful Lucretia took her own life with a dagger. It came as a surprise and was incomprehensible to everyone. But that was also quite a while ago, in 510 B.C. (My masterpiece isn’t finished yet, of course—as you can see.)
May 2026 – Today, I’ll skip the usual background fuss. Just the drawing itself. Instead, I finally tried drawing the body in rotation. Of course, it doesn’t yet have the quality and flair of a Baroque ceiling fresco by Tiepolo, but I’ll get there. The wall in the background is from the Abbazia di Montveglio near Bologna.
May 2026 – For a change, I didn't draw from memory this time, but traced a photo instead. It's actually quite nice and a good exercise to do every now and then.
May 2026 – Just a handful of very quick sketches here and there to finally break away from the same old poses. It’s about time. “I don’t mind boring others. I definitely don’t want to bore myself.” David Hockney
April 2026 – Painting by Numbers: 1) Make a sketch. 2) Add a dark background and highlight with white. 3) Overlay texture layers. Awesome! – And the best part: in the end, it looks like more than it actually is...
March 2026 – Clothes make the man. So now I’m making clothes. Or at least the pitiful remnants that are left over from the prehistoric or post-apocalyptic carnage.
March 2026 – It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled in landscape format. It’s not really my thing, and there’s still a lot of room for improvement; it’s not quite finished yet. And it probably never will be. My attention span is getting shorter and shorter, too.
January, February 2026 – Yeah, my friend Conrad is right, of course; I really am stuck in the ’90s. Oh well. It wasn’t actually that bad back then. – By the way, the drawings are of Nemesis; you can tell by the sword and the hourglass. She’s a daughter of the night and punishes hubris, so she’s got quite a lot on her plate right now.
December 2025 – The Trilogy Trick: If one alone is too weak, just line up three side by side. Et voilà—suddenly it looks like something. Namely, a concept. More substance through appearance. By the way, the three figures above are the ancient drama queens Pandora, Cassandra, and Salome.
September 2025 – Before I keep repeating the same drawing over and over, here’s a new series. I’m calling it: The New Series.
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Plain Album 05
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Plain Album 03
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Plain Album 06
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Plain Album 07
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Plain Album 08
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Plain Album 09
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Plain Album 10
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Plain Album 11
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Plain Album 12
August 2025 – Without a model and, above all, without a goal. – Maybe it’s heading toward New Objectivity with a dash of symbolism and a pinch of Gil Elvgren or Hans Baldung Grien.
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Pattern Album 01
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Pattern Album 06
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Pattern Album 04
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Pattern Album 02
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Pattern Album 03
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Pattern Album 05
July 2025 – A stopover with the Pre-Raphaelites, their intricate patterns, and their consumptive muses. (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris)
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Progress Album 01
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Progress Album 06
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Progress Album 04
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Progress Album 03
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Progress Album 02
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Progress Album 05
May–June 2025 – Fully committed to the artistic tradition of Graubünden, I celebrate self-satisfied triviality: monochrome, monotonous works of art caught in the dull, joyless tension between earthy brown and slate gray.
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Sketch Album 02
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Sketch Album 01
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Sketch Album 03
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Sketch Album 04
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Sketch Album 05
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Sketch Album 07
March–April 2025 – I’m starting to draw again. Nulla dies sine linea. (Apelles) Diligence is the root of all ugliness. Ambition is the last refuge of the failure. (Oscar Wilde) I find that more apt, but I’ll keep practicing anyway.
PENCIL DRAWINGS FROM THE 1990s
NOSTALGIA
Things weren't better back then. And I certainly wasn't.
Pencil and paper. That actually worked, too. Just using a rubber instead of “Undo.” And without electricity. I still have more than enough paper, but I just don't feel like it anymore. There's nothing you can do about it, and you don't have to.
Software
Procreate for iOS Adobe Photoshop for macOS
Hardware
Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils, 9H–2B (mostly HB and F) iPad Pro—but not the newest one (5th generation, 12.9-inch, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB storage, 2021) The 16 GB allows for 118 layers when working with images at 3200 x 4800 pixels—right now I’m using about half of that …
