The Laundromat Sketches

There isn't anything I miss about the laundromat. Actually, there isn't anything I miss about going to the laundromat. A few years ago, it was a weekly ritual: hauling a huge yellow sack(like some sort of bizarro cross-bred Big Bird-St. Nick monstrosity) from my S St. apartment, past Rhode Island avenue, and down 7th St. NW to the closest laundromat. The trip was a third of a mile, give or take a darkened corner or two, and I wish I could have given up some of those on some nights. For some reason, I always ended up doing my laundry in the deadest, stillest hours of the city night, or at least that part of the city.

Anyway, the trek aside, I do miss one thing about the laundromat: the downtime. In between loads and folding, I relaxed. There wasn't much time for that in between a struggling marriage and a cluster-fucked disaster of a job, but at the odd hours of the night at a (relatively) deserted Shaw Laundrymat, there was me time.

I read, watched TV, but mostly I sketched. Sometimes from the magazines I was reading(well, most times), and other times I doodled from memory or imagination.

Going through some boxes I haven't touched since moving, I found some of these "Laundromat Sketches", and I thought it would be neat(and self-indulgent) to share them here. Click for full-sized versions.

A dog.

A woman, drawn from a stock photo.

From a magazine photo-shoot, probably GQ. I like drawing the same subject in multiple poses, and fashion magazines provide good material for that.