21 August 04
Another Sketching Jaunt
Today Numenius and I took a trip to a zoo we hadn’t visited before: the one in Folsom. This was a refreshing change from previous zoos we’d been to; the focus is entirely on providing a safe home for mostly California-native animals that would either not have made it in the wild or would have had to have been destroyed. There are several camp-marauding bears, injured raptors, foxes, wolves, wolf/dog hybrids, tigers rescued from an illegal breeder (who apparently had 60 large cats in an area maybe three of them could have lived in comfortably), bunnies and chickens rescued from overzealous Easter gift-bearing relatives, ferrets, and so on. Peacocks, including an interesting male albino, supervised all day. The reason we went, though, is so I could do some studies of mountain lions.
I wish I had access to an inexhaustible warehouse of high-quality photographs of wildlife I could use whenever I needed an image for a project at work. We have a couple of good shots here and there, but you don’t want to overuse these. Plus, I could never get a photo of what it is I want—a mother looking out, two cubs playing—in the order and so on. I’ll have to do it myself.
My illustration teacher used to tell us to be sure to get a variety of pictorial references before starting a project. Photos should be a last resort. Live was always best, she said; video’s pretty good (funky pause buttons make an animal almost seem to be in motion); taxidermy and skeletons have their uses. But live is certainly best (and most challenging). Although the Folsom Zoo currently has no mountain lion cubs, I was able to see things in these animals I’d never noticed before. Our kittens are structurally similar but there are important differences; the mountain lion, though small for a large cat, is massive and moves heavily (though a couple of pounces showed us how little chance you’d have to get away if one decided you were somehow superfluous).
Above is a group of sketches I reworked when we got home this afternoon, a combination of watercolor pencil and watercolor.
6 August 04
Iraq In Ink And Wash
Artist Steve Mumford from New York has made several trips to Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, capturing views of life there ranging from open-air markets to the battlefield in a wonderful series of drawings and paintings. In a world where the digital camera is commonplace, it’s remarkable to see someone out there in the field with sketchbook and brush. (Thanks to Danny Gregory.)
14 July 04
Waterbrushes
On our trip to the Sacramento Zoo last week, I tried out Pica’s Niji waterbrush. This is a synthetic brush that is attached to a squeezable handle that one fills with water. I was quite impressed with the utility of this tool, especially for field use in working with watercolor pencils and small watercolor pan kits. It provides a lot of control in how much water reaches the brush, and it is much easier ergonomically than filling a tiny cup with water and dipping a brush in it everytime one wants to add some brushwork to a watercolor pencil sketch.
Anyway, we ordered some more of these brushes in several different sizes from John Neal Books, and they arrived yesterday. Here is a sketch I did today showing Mt. Diablo at dusk, together with the 15mm waterbrush.
6 July 04
Watercolor Compendium
Today I found the site handprint: watercolors and watercolor painting, which is an amazingly comprehensive resource about watercolor materials and techniques. The section on paints and pigments, with hundreds of evaluations of different paints, is alone worth much study.
3 July 04
Distant Cousins
Numenius and I took a trip to the Sacramento Zoo today to do some sketching. If you don’t mind an audience (human), it’s a great place to sketch; the animals are used to having people around and sit still. Actually, they sit in a torpitude that only prolonged incarceration can bring.
This sketch is of a female orangutan that picked up a piece of fabric and draped it over her head not unlike the chadors I saw when I was in Iran. She looked right at me, a suffering buddha. I was almost too distraught to notice the children around us, yelling “monkey, over here!” or older children yelling “where’s the wrench”? I got fatigued quite quickly after this.
A creature that can gaze at us like this—it knows. It knows us. It knew me.
30 June 04
A Pancake Journal
If one is ever lacking for subjects to sketch, breakfast is always a possibility. The site Pancakes Across America has a set of galleries of pencil sketches of pancakes from many breakfast places across the country. For instance, here is a sketch of a three-stack of buttermilk pancakes eaten in Bardstown, Kentucky.
I’m not sure what subject would make a good culinary travel journal for me. Burritos, perhaps?
27 June 04
To Learn, and Learn, and Learn
Coup de Vent at London and the North has just written about our feelings of loss as the little comfortable corner of the blogosphere we’ve settled into shifts, much as a kitten on a sunny nook of tile floor discovers that the source of heat has moved on.
I’ve been pondering this all day. Yesterday we bought a copy of Peter Steinhart’s The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (Knopf, 2004). Although I’m not very far along in this, the startling truth is that life drawing classes are chock-a-block full of people who show up with compulsive regularity, not to produce ART, but simply to get better. Maybe one day.
As Steinhart relates of Hokusai, at the age of seventy-three: “From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”
While this kind of timetable can become a little depressing, it also argues, I think, for showing up every day and TRYING. I think this can extend to the blog as well as drawing. While there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are blogs, I wonder whether some of us aren’t tempted by the lure of the immediate success, the instant masterpiece; this is what our culture (Western, Butuki, but I’m not sure Japan is immune) is pushing us towards.
I hope, one day, to do a drawing that’s a little bit good. I hope also, one day, to write a piece, here or elsewhere, that’s a little bit good. Until then, I’m grateful to people who read here and either refrain from pointing out my shortcomings or are actually positively encouraging. I am so grateful, basically, for this community.
Incidentally, Michael Moore feels a bit more urgency than some of us might, and so I’m also grateful he has put Fahrenheit 9/11 out there for all of us. Not just the choir he was palpably preaching to in the theatre we saw it in yesterday; all of us. See it if you get the chance.
1 June 04
Sketching On The Run
Our first stop on this past weekend’s birding trip was the Big Morongo Preserve, a riparian oasis in the transition zone between the Mojave and Colorado deserts. I hadn’t adapted yet to the routine of 6 AM morning starts, but Morongo Valley is good for brightly-colored birds, and a spectacular view of a yellow-breasted chat woke me up. Richard quickly went into digiscoping mode, and other trip companions got out their telephoto lenses. I wanted to record the bird too, so I reached for my journal and sketchbook. This got me started doing a fair amount of sketching this weekend.
At the entrance to the preserve there is a set of bird feeders with many different types of food. At right is a sketch of a ladder-backed woodpecker at one of the sugar water feeders normally used by the hummingbirds.
I’m pretty happy with my sketching materials right now. All these sketches were done with a fine size Gelly Roll pen with the color added using Derwent watercolour pencils. Dabbing water on the sketch adds a bit of a wash to the color pencil, and the ink of the Gelly Roll pens is waterproof and doesn’t smear. The landscape at left is looking across the Salton Sea to mountains in the east.
A characteristic of sketching while birding is that one needs to work fast. The group is always moving on to find the next bird, leaving scarcely any time for detail in the sketch. The combination of waterproof pen and colored pencil seems about as efficient as possible for rendering line and color. One can also add color or dab in some water for a wash a little later, such as riding in the car proceeding to the next stop.
My subjects were mostly landscapes, birds, and plants. At right is leaves and fruit of Rhus trilobata, a chaparral shrub in the cashew family which we found in our journey up the Santa Rosa Mountains on the west side of the Coachella Valley.
Carrying around my journal with one hand all the time while birding gets tedious, so today I bought from a local nature gift store a nifty field guide tote that I can put my journal in, as well as a set of pencils and a pen.
23 May 04
Lunchtime Forays
On Friday at lunchtime I went with two of my work buddies on a sketching jaunt. We walked to the California Raptor Center. Greg drew the barred owl, Andrea concentrated on the Swainson’s hawk. I did a lot of very quick sketches of different birds. At left is the head of a turkey vulture whose name is Balzac.
It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, for me: simply putting pen or pencil to paper sort of scrubs out the inside of my head and is better than almost anything for making me feel in tune with the world.
I’m hoping we can do more of these outings on Fridays at lunch…
16 May 04
Paper Inconveniences
There was a lengthy Slashdot thread last Friday about metric paper sizes such as the A4 standard, it referring to a text that gives everything one might ever possibly want to know about international paper sizes.
I guess Americans aren’t much into folding things. Once one learns about the essential property of metric paper sizes—that when cut in half on the longer side of the piece of paper, one gets the next paper size down (i.e. an A4 piece of paper cut in half becomes two A5 notepad-sized sheets of paper), thanks to the longer side being the square root of two times the length of the shorter side, one starts finding the U.S. letter-sized 8 1/2×11 inch to be annoyingly inconvenient. According to the above site, this was an arbitrary choice of paper size, apparently “just a commercial compromise at the time [1921] to reduce inventory requirements without requiring significant changes to existing production equipment.”
The U.S. letter size also seems difficult to work with in terms of laying out text aesthetically on a sheet of paper. Alas A4 paper is hard to find in this country. Maybe it’s time to special-order some.