A good friend of mine, Danielle Stoermer, is serving in abroad as part of the Peace Corps in Senegal. She’s doing fantastic work with the local community regarding sustainable agriculture and the construction of a very needed seed storage facility. You can read more about what she’s doing on her blog, and on the Peace Corps page.
Danielle photographs and documents all the happenings in Kayemor, and some of her photographs have turned out really striking. One in particular was of a woman listening to a seed storage talk/discussion. And it struck me as a really interesting portrait – I just had to sketch it! It looked like a mix of ‘the thinker’ and ‘the girl with a pearl earring’. Was the pose really that dramatic? Probably not, she could have been thinking about something really mundane for all I know, but there’s an intensity in that woman’s face nonetheless. Below is the original and my sketch:
