Kaleb Temple is a doodler. And a prolific doodler at that—in the past couple of years he’s drawn more than 5,000 sketches. In the past two weeks alone, he’s drawn close to 80 sketches of people he knows, people he’s met online and people he makes up in his head. On average, that’s nearly 200 drawings a month.
Some days he doesn’t doodle at all; and some days, he sketches up to 60 portraits.
“I’ve always drawn,” says Temple, who’s also a local filmmaker and works at the Nevada Museum of Art. “I’ve long been drawing just for the heck of it.”
Temple draws portraits of people, using just pencil on pieces of paper folded into fourths. He calls them “quarter sheet doodles,” and they look kind of like zines. He posts his drawings to an album on his Facebook profile, and a friend encouraged him to start a profile on photography app Instagram to publish his work. His Instagram account, under the screen name kaleb_the_doodler, has nearly 600 followers.
“About 99 percent of the faces I draw are of people I just made up,” he says. He’ll draw portraits on request for free—although “my mom keeps saying I should start charging for it,” he says—and he uses a photograph for reference. Each drawing takes him around 10 to 15 minutes.
“It takes me about three or so minutes to go through the photos on their Facebook account,” he says. “I try to put my own spin on the photograph to make a brand new image of them.”
He also adds text to every sketch, typically “pessimistic” in nature, which he says is his sense of humor.
“I draw the portrait, and come up with a quote to go with it,” says Temple. “It’s usually a word or a phrase that reminds me of the person, or I just make something up.” Alongside a sketch of a woman with curly hair and big eyes, a quote reads, “I wasn’t looking for the thuggish, criminal type, but then Franky walked into my life;” a profile of a man looking out of the corner of his eye is accompanied with, “All of our money went toward your wasted education.”
In this way, Temple’s style is evocative of comic books, a medium he studied while working on his art degree several years ago at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“For a while I really wanted to become a comic book artist,” he says. “Sketching like this becomes a lot like story-boarding.”
Temple says he’s inspired by strangers, and creates original characters based on combinations of different features.
“I’ll remember a certain unique nose, or an expression, or a specific trait that I later incorporate into a sketch,” he says. On occasion, he’ll also draw celebrities—he was recently commissioned to create a drawing of Jay Z, Daft Punk, Thom Yorke, Ricky Gervais, Ric Flair, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.
Most of the requests for portraits are from friends and local acquaintances, but Temple’s heard from people as far as Brazil. He notes that social networking has been a useful—and free—platform for publishing. Instagram’s gallery-like interface functions as an accessible portfolio for artists, and he uses hashtags like #art, #sketch, and #doodle. This helps attract people who are looking for artists on Instagram.
“It gets people seeing your art,” he says. “It opens up a whole new world for who becomes your audience.”