My wife recently reconnected over Zoom with a colleague whom she hadn’t seen for over 30 years. She mentioned that I paint on an iPad, and he expressed curiosity. So she caught an animated screenshot, and I spent 1 hour, 48 minutes in Sketch Club trying to render his image using a total of 5,644 brush strokes (Brush – 3,295; Blur – 37; Eraser – 54; Sketchy, my favorite tool – 264; and Smudge – 1994) on 2 layers with 78 undos. I’d say I came pretty close to capturing his expressive essence. Close enough for me. I’ve mentioned it before, when you spend time with someone’s features, you get to know them in a different sort of way. It might be that I get to know and maybe even broaden a certain empathetic part of me. Not completely sure.