I've been looking through my old drawing sketchbooks, which are all stacked together in my closet. These sketchbooks go back to my high school days. Evidently, I never throw anything artistic out. But sometimes I find unusually good pieces of sketchery. It's somewhat depressing that I could draw so well thirty years ago and so poorly nowadays. This sketch dates from September 1982. It is for a painting project which I don't think I ever did. The portrait poser is a friend of mine from Massachusetts (and she is still my friend, though I haven't lived in Mass. for 22 years). She posed in costume for a number of "roles" in my fantasy art. This one is for a character, "High Lord Elena," in a book by Stephen R. Donaldson. He is a long-winded fantasy talespinner whose books about a miserable leper magically transferred to a world he has to save, were unaccountably popular in the late 70s and early 80s.
In those days, life was slower, and we all were less busy, and no one had an iPhone or any other type of cell phone, and I could invite my friends over for a portrait session and it wouldn't take weeks of schedule maneuvering to have them give me a few hours of posing for a portrait.
"High Lord Elena" is pencil on sketchbook paper (note how yellowed it has gotten in 28 years), 11" x 14".
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