This week (the first week of May 2026) I was showing some of my drawings to a student of mine and he asked the question, “Where did you get the idea for that shape?”. I had used a, sort of, halo shape behind the person in the drawings head. I gave him the short answer of it was a halo like in Russian icon paintings. But then as I thought about it later I came up with a longer answer. It has to do with how I draw as seen in my sketchbooks. This is that longer answer.
First off I name my sketchbooks. That way I can tell them apart. I started doing this back in my college days and have been doing it ever since. I wish I had learned to date the pages of my sketchbooks back then but that didn’t start until sometime in the early 2000s. I am lucky if I dated when I started or finished the book back then.
The first sketchbook that explains the evolution of my drawing is an 8.5×11 hardbound one. It has a black cover and you can still find a lot of sketchbooks like this one. Its name is “Snow” and it’s from my college days. It’s probably from 1988. It has maybe eighty pages in it. It’s filled will unimpressive drawings. And when I say “Filled” probably half the space in it is used up. Some pages have a single little drawing on them.
I used this book as a space for working drawings. There are no finished drawings in it. There is some writing in it, some layouts for comics, some drawings for paintings, and even some math. It’s student work. There is nothing in it for anyone but my young self figuring things out. I remember being a little embarrassed when people would look through it. That’s standard for young artists. I carried these type of black hardbound sketchbooks with me well into the 1990s.
The second sketchbook I have has the date of December 1994 in it. It’s a 6×9 inch spiral bound (on the top/short side) one with 30 pages in it. Its name is “Prospect” but I don’t even remember this one. I don’t think I carried it around with me. It’s one that sat in the studio and waited for me to draw in it. This one has a lot of me figuring out character designs in it. Some in ink but most in pencil. It also has some figuring out of compositions and layouts. There is even some Magic the Gathering notes in it.
Out of the thirty pages in this book there are actually two finished drawings. They are nothing like the “Realism” of the sketches and working drawings and are two strange characters that predict where my drawing will go in the future. There is also what looks like the begins of my “Triangle” style of basic drawing that I eventually adopted. That’s where I view the very basics of the human form as triangles. The arms are two triangles, the shoulders and waist form a triangle, and the two legs are triangles. It’s not quite there yet but I can see it coming.
The next sketchbook has the dates 12/10/95 to 3/5/97 written in them. It’s 6×9 inches with 70 pages in it and is spiral bound on the long side. Its name is “Hydraulic Ram.” In this one I can see more of the triangles taking shape and it is also mostly filled with character designs and working drawings.
This one also has a lot of comic book storytelling type of work in it. There are layouts for a couple of comic book stories that I drew plus the scripts for them written in the back. This one even has the sketches for my first business card. Most of the book is in pencil but somewhere near the back I start drawing in ink.
“Clipper” is from January 1, 2000 until June 18, 2001. It’s 5.5×8.5 inches and has 100 pages. It’s spiral bound on the long side. This one is important because it’s my very first Inkbook. This first one took me a year and a half to fill but now I get one of them done a year and I am on Inkbook 27.
I call these my Inkbooks because I draw in them in ink. No pencil allowed. This one is full of ink drawings some of which could almost be called finished. Most pages have one to four drawings on them. Some of the drawings were made into finished drawings or paintings but most exist on their own in this book. Over the years my Inkbooks have evolved. Now I do about nine little drawings per page and it’s all about generating ideas out of thumbnail images.
Next we have a hardcover spiral bound 5×6 inch sketchbook. For some reason it has no name. It has about forty pages in it and has the starting date of May 2001. This begins the specialization of my sketchbooks. I’m always buying different sketchbooks of different types and sizes. I was back then too but now I try to find different uses for them. This one started out looking like one of my Inkbooks with small ink drawings in them but then quickly turned into one I used for general working drawings. It has layouts and ideas for some of the prints and “Covers to Comics That Don’t Exist” I was making. Lots of triangle people basic drawing in this one. It even has some comic strip layouts in it.
Four by six inches is the size of next sketchbook dated May 2002. It also has no name. It’s spiral bound across the top short side and has 24 pages in it. It’s filled with single page ink drawings. Each one is as finished as I’d expect and is made up of spontaneous shapes that I make up as I draw. But themes develop in these shapes like beams of light from people’s eyes and halos around their heads. There is a little writing in this one too.
Then we have one that is the same type as the last one. It has a name. “Slideshow.” This one is from 5/19/03 until 7/5/03. This one is filled with finished pencil drawings. I was drawing my oracle deck and I used my Surrealist Automatic Drawing technique to make all these drawings. That technique is like finding faces in clouds. I scribble all over the page and see what I can find in the lines. This leads to all sorts of shapes and weird figures and brings out my influences. A lot of those influences art the art of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Japanese, Chinese, and anyone else you got.
By this era of sketchbooks I was almost 100% specialized with my sketchbooks. Each had a purpose. But I still do usually have a general purpose one but those take a long time to fill up these days.
That brings us to Inkbook 27. My current one. I now use basic shapes to draw small thumbnail drawings spontaneously on the page. That leads to a lot of basic shapes in drawings. Circles, rectangles, and triangles. Add that to my love of historical art form long ago and I end up with halos from time to time. That’s where that shape came from. And I made a video about it.