Nick

This is Nick. You can see the first portrait of Nick that I did a couple of years ago here. You really have to see both of them to get a better sense of Nick's personality.

For this portrait, Nick came over to our house a few days before heading back to college after Christmas break. He sat across from me at our dining room table while I sketched and we talked.

Today I took a photo of my sketch and was trying to decide what else it needed before posting it and I thought back to the first time I really got to hang around Nick. I had just separated from my first wife and Alex (my son) and I had moved into a small cottage that happened to be right next door to Nick's family. Alex and Nick became fast friends and spent a lot of time hanging out together in and around that cottage. We only lived there a year or so and then moved to another house a few blocks away from the cottage. Anyway, I remembered a sketch I did about 10 years ago sitting at the dining table in that little cottage and sketching the view out of the window and I thought that would make a perfect background to Nick's portrait. It took me awhile to find the sketchbook it was in but I did and scanned it into the computer and put it "behind" Nick's portrait digitally. It's a little strange in a twilight zone kind of way but it carries a special meaning for me now, and maybe it will for Nick too.

12x16 Pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor in my huge Moleskine sketchbook.