Last July when I went to Chicago to see True West, we stayed at The Wit, a hotel right on the Northern edge of The Loop. From our hotel room, we could see this cool building with an array of satellite dishes on the roof. Turns out, it’s the home of WLS-TV, Chicago’s channel 7. More importantly for us, the ground floor of the corner of that building plays host to a Potbelly restaurant where we got lunch a time or two during our stay. I took tons of reference photos and those inspired this piece, another pencil drawing using the Blackwing Palamino pencil that has been my weapon of choice of late. You can see the most in-focus of these photos below.

This one took a lot of time, and caused a lot of hand cramps, and since I was getting lazy I just blacked out the other buildings that could be seen behind this one, but I’m hapy with the composition and with the way it came out. I have been asked if any of these recent pencil pieces are for sale, and for now the answer is “no.” After having spent such a long time not being happy with my real-world art, I consider these to still just be steps in my progress, and don’t really want to part with any of them. Maybe that’ll change a few months down the road, but for now I want these pieces on hand so I can reference what I’m doing as I move forward.

This was done on a slick paper intended for pens. I wanted to see how the pencil would behave with a nearly flat surface. There was a lot of tissue-smudging in places and some digital cropping because I got sloppy near the edges, but I’m reasonably happy with this one, although the scan leaves a bit to be desired.To answer a question before it’s asked, hell yes I used a straight-edge. I used one of those and a flexible curve last week, too.

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon presents eight hours of Prognosis starting at 7 AM. Herman Linte chose these four episodes, and for unspecified reasons, he chose four of the episodes hosted by yours truly last year when Herman was dealing with nodules on his vocal cords.  At 3 PM we are expecting to bring you am encore episode of Prognosis from a couple of months ago with Herman hosting his show himself.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Also, some time after noon today you can expect the next couple of entries in The 2019 PopCult Gift Guide. Because I feel a little behind last week, I have decided to extend the Gift Guide past Black Friday, and will continue to post at least one gift recommendation each day from Black Friday until December 12. Before that, we’ll do between two and five posts per day.