Bad hands

This is the plate I did of Samuel Alito, and is one of the first I made ever. I started with the face and was pleased to capture a hint of the paradoxical combination of boredom and vigilance that often marks his expression. (Though I am not sure the drawing really looks like him...). Then I got to that hand and really struggled to find the creases.

My friend, Liz, who spent a significant portion of her teenage years drawing nothing but hands and feet, gave me advise along the way, but to no avail. That part of the drawing got completely muddy; the hand itself looks like it was recently stung by a bee. And, as I have yammered about before,with markers there is no way to make the drawing lighter. So the pictured got darker and darker as I labored to find the right lines.

I have been drawing consistently for about a year and half now; hands are still difficult. One false move and you end up with something that looks like it should be in the Simpsons. Sometimes, I will lose count on the number of folds that a given digit has.

Justice William Brennan

William Brennan was one of the great liberals of the Warren Court. I was excited to do this drawing, in part, because it was the first time that I worked from a painting rather than a photograph. (Here is the source.) The result is mixed-- I am really pleased with his left half (right side of the drawing). His left eye came out just right. The right eye is another story. I kept adding more ink and the drawing got muddy on me and the paper started to break down.

That brings me to a couple of the difficulties of the Make-it-Plate medium. First, with markers there is no way to make a drawing get lighter. Even if you add a lighter color to an area you are working on, it is always more ink and thus darker that it had been. Second, the drawings are done on these circular pieces of paper that Make-it sends to you. The paper is not designed for fine art, and if you overwork a part of the drawing, the fibers of the paper start coming up, and if you are not careful you can end up with a hole.

I suspect that I could send Make-it scans of my drawings and have them print from the scans (they do print plates from photos), but I haven't tried to hook that up. I guess I am attached to the limitations of the process.

A couple last things about the drawing: the robe-- I spent hours trying to capture the subtle gradations in color that are so apparent in the painting, but it didn't quite work out for me; and the more than passing resemblance to George W. Bush-- I hesitate to point it out because once you see W it's difficult to see anyone else.

Justice Harry Blackmun

A few weeks ago, I was commissioned to make a plate of Justice Harry Blackmun. The guy who ordered the plate was giving it to a friend of his who had clerked for Blackmun. When he ordered the plate, he asked that I not make any reference to abortion (not that I would have), as Blackmun authored the majority in Roe v. Wade.

Roe notwithstanding, Blackmun drew the ire of conservatives as a justice who wound up a being a great deal more liberal than the president (Richard Nixon) who nominated him. Stevens (nominated by Ford) and Souter (nominated by Bush I) are the other big examples that played a outsized role in the rise of the conservative Federalist Society.

In a dissent of a denial of a petition to be heard by the Supreme Court, Blackmun beautifully voiced his opposition to the death penalty:

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question--does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die?--cannot be answered in the affirmative."

The whole opinion can be found here.

Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, recently wrote a book about him that is supposed to be quite good. I have it by my bedside, but have yet to crack it.

I really enjoyed doing this drawing, and feel that it came out as well as any I have done. I always find the robes particularly difficult-- it is something about the gradations of black that magic markers don't really accommodate. His right arm got away from me but, I do feel good about the highlights above the book.