Sunday, February 6, 2011

More Coffee sketches

For some reason, the cafe was emptier this week. There was a greater proportion of women in too. Now, might this have something to do with the Superbowl? I don't know. It was 11 AM. Do people who usually drink coffee on Sunday morning also take entire days to prepare for TV sporting events ("It's not an event, it's the event!"). There were more cars than I usually see in the church parking lot. "Let's go, Steelers. Steelers, let's go. Amen."

Ignore the girl on top. These are sketchbook pages, whole and unedited. And I drew her last week. The woman on the bottom was reading children's books, and she had on a huge sweater. i assume she was a librarian or a pre-school teacher or something. Perhaps a decade or two ago, she might have been a social worker or an arts coordinator. I'll bet she was a liberal too. All this I got from the way her hair was tied back.

The bloke on bottom was working on equations or Physics or taxes. Whatever he was writing, numbers, and words combined in a singularly unpleasant way, I could see because he was sitting right next to me. He was also muttering in such a way that the vein on his forehead popped out. It made me think he didn't want to be disturbed, so I had to draw him very sneakily. Then he got up and left before I could get to his beard. He had a beard. Imagine a white beard on the bottom of that face. The girl must have been studying too, on the other side of the room. I only saw her smile once, when a toddler wandered by and said something darndest.

Here we have a short girl, a tall woman, and a man in a hat. The girl on top was sitting in a big easy chair to the left of me, doing what I assume was college work, completely undisturbed by the two other girls on the couch next to her, who were moving too fast to draw, and who were talking about either a fantasy ficiton or a game or possibly both. They were havinga grand time. She was not. Neither was the short-haired woman. She was more contemplative. Long periods would pass with her staring into space. I drew her hand in that position while she did that once, and she never did it again. At one point, she got up and left the cafe. Then she came back a few minutes later and sat in the same spot. Huh. The fellow looks like one of those kind of guys who thinks he plays more sports than he actually does. His hat was not really crooked.

Way far in the back of the cafe was the girl with the swoop of hair over one eye. I couldn't see her very well, and was therefor immediately consumed with the desire to draw her as detailed as possible. Why she was wearing such a light dress in 40 degree weather, I don't know, but I appreciated it. My attempts to capture the pattern of shadows on her shoulders were only semi-successful, but only because the lighting back there was so complex that every twitch changed it completely. I have the notion that I had seen the short-haired girl before. She came in late and talked for a long time with her two friends (backs to me) about this other friend she knew who was totally gay, and totally didn't know it, even though he accepted a date from a guy, and oh my god! And y'know, his fraternal twin sister is a lesbian. So, like, that might be the genes, do they share genes, if, y'know, you believe the genes, like, dictate whether you're gay. I'm trying to figure out how to tell him.

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