My brother is a photographer, and we often encourage each other in our creative endeavors. At the start of 2025, we decided to do a weekly challenge where we would both draw or photograph something using the same prompt. We only continued the challenge for a few months before the busyness of life and parenting overwhelmed both of us, but we both produced some cool pictures along the way. These pencil sketches are my responses to two of the earlier prompts in the series: “shadows” shows the vase and houseplants on my bedroom dresser at two different times of day, and “something that makes you smile” is a self-portrait with one of my sister-in-law’s chickens in Oregon.