The Sketches of Richard Thompson

David Apatoff in Illustration Art.

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the brilliant Richard Thompson. I recently had the pleasure of working with five other fans to compile a book on the Art of Richard Thompson, available from Andrews McMeel on Amazon this fall:

As we get closer to the release date, I will tell you about the book and its beautiful full color paintings, complex illustrations and comic strips. But today I'd like to focus on the preliminary sketches and doodles that we found littering the floor of Richard's studio like used Kleenex. 

You'll never get closer to Richard's happy genius than in these sketches, often with footprints on them or crumpled and folded from being jammed into old boxes.

I am generally an enemy of cross hatching, but I have never seen anyone fling cross hatching onto the page with such audacity. If you are foolish enough to begin cross hatching a night sky, you'd damn well better have an exit strategy this good.

Whether a face has been caricatured a million times or never, you can still see Richard's sketches honestly seeking out the most fundamental forms and designs:

There will be time later to talk about the complexities of Richard's oil paintings but me, I always feel closer to the DNA in drawings such as these.