Colder Than Mars, They Said

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Have you noticed that the news exaggerates everything? They no longer report. Rather, they compete with Downton Abbey and football games for viewers and will do everything and anything to make their program entertaining. I expect that soon, Captain America or Thor will replace Wolf Blitzer as anchor of CNN.

It’s really sad. The week we were told about how Canada was “colder than Mars” a couple days ago. While it’s true that, for a period of a few hours, a part of Canada was colder than where NASA’s robot was on Mars, but Canada didn’t get to -200C when the sun went down like it does on Mars.

Heck, we only got down to -40C and it had warmed all the way up to -36C by the time I got the bright idea to walk to the museum to meet my buddies for a sketching session. For those who are Fahrenheit-challenged, -40C is -40F. Warmer than Mars on a summer’s eve for sure, but still sort of cold by freeze your skin standards.

So off I went, the intrepid sketcher, walking as fast as I could on a 40-minute walk to the museum. A smarter sketcher would have just hopped on a bus but no, I “needed the exercise.”

By the time I got there I realized that I’d been crazy. I could no longer feel my fingers in spite of the heavy gloves I was wearing. My face was on fire and the I was starting to think in terms of how much further I could walk before I’d fall over.

But I finally arrived…warmth. Next problem was how to sketch when I couldn’t feel the pen. I walked around for about 15 minutes before deciding to do a looser sketch than my typical approach, maybe as a result of Liz Steel’s course. I sat down in front of the largest head in the Olympus display. It’s at least two-feet tall and very impressive – more impressive than this sketch suggests. My fountain pens were really cold so I used a Uniball Vision Fine hybrid gel pen, adding a hint of color with Faber-Castell watercolor pencils. Of course, it was drawn in a Stillman & Birn Alpha series sketchbook (10×7).

We took a break, had some tea, and then did a bit more sketching before calling it a day. I took the bus home, a nice, warm bus.

Sketching A Door

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Larry Marshall

One of the exercises for this week’s Liz Steel Foundations class was to draw a door. This was supposed to be our “outdoor” exercise.

There is nothing I’d rather do than draw outdoors but I’m afraid that weather dictates that I won’t be able to do that until at least April and that’s being optimistic. Not wanting to wait quite that long to do the assignment, I found an alternative. As I was leaving the museum I noticed that if I sat down just inside the rear entrance, I could see the door across the street. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The door leads into the Hotel Saint Pierre but the door has a far richer history as it served as the main entrance of the “Quebec Assurance Building,” and the interesting thing is that this is carved, in English, in the upper reaches of the building – a remnant of times past as it’s fairly rare to find English written anywhere in Quebec City.

The exercise goal was to ‘set up by measurement’ and thus the principle goal was “..to be as accurate as possible.” I can’t say that I was (sorry Liz) but I did it in my typical cartoony style and in spite of what it looks like, I did measure, with my thumb stuck up in the air and everything. I really enjoyed sketching something that wasn’t a statue and I think I need to look around for some more doors to look out of.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Black

Sketching On A Sunday Morning

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Larry Marshall

I went to the museum this morning and decided to draw a short column piece featuring three woman. I didn’t have my pencil case with me so I decided to do it in my sketchbook (10×7), using my Namiki Falcon. This is one time when I wished for larger paper as it was hard to capture all the detail in what is roughly an 8″ high sketch. But it was a bundle of fun to do.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10x7), Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Docu Black ink

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Docu Black ink

Addendum: I was playing around last night and added just a hint of color to this sketch. I think it improved it somewhat, mostly by removing some of the starkness of the black on white. I didn’t want to turn it into a color sketch but now I’m wondering what it would look like if I increased the tonal variation even more. What do you think?

Artemis: Greek Goddess Of The Hunt

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Larry Marshall

Long before Katniss Everdeen shot squirrels in the forest surrounding District 12, Artemis was the protectress of nature and the hunt for the Greeks. With her spiffy garb and bow & arrow, she most certainly could have wowed them in any Greek version of the Hunger Games.

As a sketching subject she caught my attention, though the statue I drew from only had the stub of her bow gripped in her hand. I used my artistic license to add her bow. It just wasn’t right that she’d lost it.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Pilot Prera, De Atramentis Document Brown

Odd Little Guy From Greek Theatre

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Larry Marshall

When I think of “Greek theatre” what comes to mind are large, outdoor stages with row after row of seats carved from rock, creating an amphitheatre of sorts. I don’t know if this is because of something I was told in high school or something I’ve seen at some point in my life. Truth is, I know nothing of Greek theatre.

Votive, head about 6″ tall

The big exhibit at our civilisation museum is all about Greek gods and statues, but there’s one section dedicated to Greek theatre. What I find odd about it is that most of the “masks” are referred to as ‘votives’ and they’re all far too small for anyone to wear. They have eye holes and the mouths are a gaping hole in the face, just as a mask might be. I assume they may have actually held a candle and that’s why they’re labelled as votives.

Interspersed amount the theatre objects are a bunch of small statues that I can’t even imagine a use for in live theatre and no explanation is provided. They’re all just a few inches tall and their mouths are, like the votives, hollowed out. Maybe they were popcorn butter dispensers.

Each is mounted on a brass rod for display, but whether this is the way they were originally displayed is unclear.

In any case, I drew this one. I used Strathmore “toned gray” paper and drew it with a Pilot Falcon filled with De Atramentis Document Black ink. As the statue was made from a tan clay, I used watercolor pencil to generate some brown tones. That was probably a mistake as this paper didn’t take kindly to my use of a waterbrush to spread the watercolor.

Little theatre guy (Strathmore toned gray paper, De Atramentis Document Black ink)