Drawings Week 2
Personal Memoir
This week I missed two days drawing. It was unavoidable. I spent the days out of town, traveling across the state to the west and south. The southern trip was longer—an overnighter—covering about 800 miles round trip, from the state capital to the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles. As I descended the Grapevine, Obi-Wan Kenobi echoes in my head, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” No insult to Los Angeles is intended. I always remember the quote when navigating a large populated area. Los Angeles is a region with its own sense of time, where driving a mere twenty miles takes over an hour, the roads choked with vehicles packed bumper to bumper across ten freeway lanes, at times my speed barely achieves 20 MPH.
California is an amazingly large state. This time of year, the tulle fog is thick in some places, the visibility low as I hurtled down I-5. Across miles of flat land and gently rolling hills, the surrounding mountain ranges obscured behind walls of white mist and a low cloud layer. Agricultural land fills the landscape of the Central Valley. The damp fields showcase multiple shades of green, with lush orchards bursting with produce, and large scale machinery prepping the soil for the next crop. The occasional stench from large scale dairy farms is overwhelming, long before the cows are visible. Water flows south in the California Aqueduct, which runs parallel to the freeway for many miles. Gas stations and fast food restaurants line the edge of the unending pavement while reflective green signs advertise distant wonders like Yosemite and San Francisco. I blare Broadway tunes for the last hundred miles—to keep awake— my precious cargo left behind in the wilds of Los Angeles for the spring semester. In four months, I’ll repeat the journey.
Meanwhile, my own class starts this week—Figure Drawing II. The syllabus, class supplies, and schedule are already posted on Canvas. At this point, the supplies are mostly assembled. An almost daily sketchbook is required. It’s a good thing that I’ve been drawing daily. I will need the discipline to fill a fifty page sketchbook over the next sixteen weeks.
Here are the sketches from the last week:
© 2026 Deborah Sweeney
Your drawings are coming along great! As for Los Angeles, it is much too large and hectic for me. One of the first times I went down there to see Austin after he and his mom moved there, I found my way to where they lived in Studio City and then had to take him to a Paramount Studio in Woodland Hills where he was going to appear briefly in a video. Without GPS, and just relying on instructions and a map, we made it there and back. I've never gotten lost during the other times I've been there to see him, but I am always so grateful to get back home!