Antique

In his regular work, Christoph Niemann starts with a punch line and works backwards. But in his Sunday Sketching series, he does the opposite: "I begin by picking a starting position — a random object and the limits of a brush-and-ink drawing — and see where the story takes me," he writes.

A couple years ago, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann felt like he needed to shake things up. "When you do any kind of creative job for a while, you become better ..." he says, "but I think you always become a little bit more predictable."

Niemann was plenty successful — his work appears in the New Yorker and he had a regular Sunday column in The New York Times Magazine. But he wanted to get out of his routine, so he decided to start a project called Sunday Sketching. Each week he took an object — say, a paperclip or a bunch of bananas — set that object on a sheet of paper and incorporated it into a sketch.



The bananas became the hindquarters of a horse. The paperclip became a beach chair. Half an avocado became a baseball glove at the end of an outstretched arm, with the pit landing in the center as the ball.

These drawings are whimsical and surprising, and Niemann has collected them along with more of his work in a new book called Sunday Sketching.

In one drawing, Niemann turns a tangled pair of Apple headphones into a mosquito. Inspiration for that one didn't come easily: "They're just like weird random white wires ... they looked like nothing," he tells NPR's Ari Shapiro.
Because Niemann usually knows where he's going with a drawing, he rarely laughs at his own visual jokes. But this sketch was different: "In this case it was like: Oh, wow, this actually looks like a mosquito," he recalls. "And that moment was fun."


Sunday Sketching is "an exercise in seeing," Niemann writes. "The greatest challenge is freeing myself from the actual function of the object."

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