I hereby confess that I am a TV junkie.  I know, I know–so lowbrow, so wasteful of time.  I really love movies too.  But every second while I am just sitting on the couch watching the TV screen, I feel guilty.  Sure, I could watch TV from the treadmill or the exercycle, but most of the time, upon pondering that option, I’ll agree that it’s something I really should  consider seriously . . . tomorrow.  Instead of watching TV at all, I could be, I should be painting or drawing or at least updating the records I used to keep of my paintings.

So, to assuage my guilt,  I keep sketchbook and pencils handy to the TV, in order to sketch from the TV screen.  In order to capture an image , I have to pause the program.  It does kind of interrupt the flow– so not something I can do when sharing the TV viewing with another human, but the dogs are perfectly OK with it.

I have collected some drawings from last year and this year, and boy, do I hope to discover that this year’s are better than last year’s!  Some nights (I mostly watch TV after sundown) I am on, others I am off; some nights nothing inspires me, other nights I am pausing the screen every five minutes.  As you will see, “Prohibition, Part 2” holds the record for number of images captured during a single program.  MI-5 is probably in second place.  But I started with ads.  My first screen captures were from an ad for an antidepressant.   They get right in your face, and the expressions are so mournful.  This one shows a blocking style that I was working on for a class at the time:

Face of a depressed man

For the rest of the year, I had permission to use shading.  Can you identify these faces without looking at the caption?

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Depressed Man was not supposed to show up in that presentation, but I don’t know how to delete him without deleting  him from the library altogether.  I think the only way to do it is to start a new blog entry.

So I am going to divide this week’s blog into two parts, just to make viewing the images more palatable (using a slide show).  I am ending this half here.  For the second half, move on  to part  two.