Nigerian Statues And Museum Sketching

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I continue to use our Musee de la Civilisation as though it were closing soon. That’s not the case, thank goodness, but I need need my daily fixes of sketching, now, don’t I?

I’ve switched my attention from Nigerian masks to Nigerian statues, of which there are many in the exhibit. Before sharing them with you, however, I thought I’d talk a bit about sketching in museums.

Museum Sketching

I’m no expert about anything related to sketching but I play the role of an urban sketcher almost daily. Because it’s cold in Quebec, my urban sketching for the past few months has been in museums and here are a few things I’ve learned.

1) Know the rules

Every museum has rules and the best way to get on the good side of the administration and security is to follow them. Even inquiring about rules is seen as a good thing.

2) Talk to the people who work there

This is particularly important. Show them your sketches. Tell them how great it is that you can sketch in ‘their’ museum. Make a point of asking if your location is ok, and try to choose locations that will be out of the way of people wandering the museum. There’s no need to hide but often a bit of thought leads to a good compromise.

3) Adjust your materials to a museum milieu

My outdoor sketching kit includes watercolors, collapsible brushes and small bottles of water. My museum kit includes watercolor pencils and a waterbrush. If you use a pencil, consider switching from an eraser that drops debris all over the floor to a kneaded eraser. And keep your working footprint as small as possible. I have a tripod stool and my small art bag leans against it behind my feet while I’m sketching.

4) Buy a light

Museums often keep light levels low in their exhibit rooms because many of the artifacts can be damaged by light. Buy a clip on light to illuminate your work. These are inexpensive – mine cost me $13.

I also carry a small piece of masonite, cut to the size of an open sketchbook. I clip the sketchbook to this, making this unit easy to hold while walking around. It serves two purposes. One is to support the sketchbook while you sketch but the other is to keep it open when you’re not as open sketchbooks stimulate more interest from museum-goers.

5) Talk to patrons

Museum goers are curious folks and they’ll be curious about your sketching. Talk to them; particularly the kids, who are often more bold than their parents. Engage them in conversations. Not only is this fun, if done regularly, the museum staff will notice and come to understand that you are an asset as well as a dumb cluck who sits in their museum day after day sketching.

About Them Nigerian Statues

I promised some Nigerian statue sketches. Here are a few that I’ve done recently. All are done with Pilot Prera, Lex Gray ink, in a Stillman & Birn Epsilon sketchbook.

While the masks seem to be made of wood, the statues are made from a variety of materials. This one is carved from a gray rock that looks like granite. It is truly gorgeous, much more so than my sketch indicates.

I fell in love with this bird which isn’t, strictly speaking, a statue. Rather, it’s a stopper for a large jug of some kind (thus the pointy thing at the bottom) It’s made from wood and, as tradition seem prone to dictate, covered in a very thin mud of some kind.

This next one isn’t a statue either. The large hollowed out area on its belly serves as a cup and, somehow, it’s used during funeral ceremonies. The sign says it allows two people to drink simultaneously. All I can say is that they’d better be very good friends.

This is a wonderful statue of a person carrying a child on their back. Very stylistic in its elongated proportions, I just love it. It’s made of wood with a sculpted clay covering and is more sophisticated than many of the other wood statues.

I’m hoping spring will be sprung from its hiding place ‘real soon’ and I can get back on the street. Until that time, I’ve got lots of great statues to sketch. Hope you’ve got a museum too.

The Hidden Fun Of Urban Sketching

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Larry Marshall

We’re lucky in Quebec City. Every year we host the International PeeWee Hockey Tournament. Kids come from around the world to spend 10 days playing hockey and walking around saying “Bonjour” to everyone because it’s the only French word they know. I know the feeling.

We live down the street from one of the two venues where the tournament takes place and I was shoveling snow when one such group walked by my house. Several of them used their one French word but one kid said, “We really like your snow.” They were from Maryland. When I said, in English, “You can have all and I’ll help you load it,” I swear a couple of them jumped off the ground.

But this post isn’t about hockey, Pee Wee or otherwise. It’s about sketching. But it’s not about the sketches I’m presenting either. Rather, it’s a post about the evening I spent with my family and thousands of hockey fans.

My habit of sketching every time I stop moving found me sitting among cheering fans, watching hockey and sketching, trying to create quick hockey player sketches by jumping from one player to another to grab a complete outline. I’d never done that before and the results show my lack of experience with the technique. But it was a LOT of fun and when the dust settled, I’d done eleven pages (5.5×8.5) of the darn things.

Ok…so if the post isn’t about hockey, and it isn’t about sketches, why are you reading this, you ask. I want to tell you a couple short stories about my interactions with some of the spectators. Too often I hear people say they are too shy or not good enough to sketch in public. These two stories, I hope, will convince you that none of that matters and that people LOVE sketchers.

The first story begins between periods during the second game. The players has just returned to the ice and I was sketching, as I had been for the past couple hours. There was a very gentle tap on my left shoulder. I turned to find it had come from the finger of a young girl, probably no more than 12-13 years old. She very shyly said, “Do you speak French?” I guess she’d heard me speaking English. I told her yes and she immediately looked up a couple rows and waved. Another young girl jumped up and ran down to us. “Hic c’est beau! J’aime beaucoup vos esquisses,” (I think) immediately came from her and she asked if she could see all of my sketches. Of course I complied, sheepishly showing her these crude sketches as she went on and on about how great they were. I showed her my pens, my waterbrush, and how I used the waterbrush to shade the sketches. They were thrilled; I was chuffed. Nothing like an appreciative audience (grin).

At the end of the second game I got a cup of tea. The food vendor lady ‘made’ me a tea, stuffing a tea bag in a styrofoam cup full of hot water. I guess she was more used to people ordering coffee as she said, “I don’t know how to make tea. If it’s no good I’ll give you your money back.” I just smiled. Quebecers are so nice.

As there were no skaters on the ice I did a quick sketch of the Zamboni (ice cleaning machine) and then decided to sketch a guy who was sitting a couple rows below me. Again, it was just a quick sketch, but at least he wasn’t in constant motion. I was nearly finished when I got a tap on my shoulder. This time it was a great big guy who was sitting behind me. He asked “Are you drawing that guy down there?” and he pointed at the guy I was sketching. My immediate thought was “Oh crap, I’m in trouble now”, but I admitted that I was. I didn’t dare let on that I didn’t think it was even close to a likeness as he obviously saw something I didn’t. He said, “That’s what I thought. He’s my friend,” and he stood up and yelled, “Marcel, viens ici” Marcel turned around, got up and came up to where we were sitting. I showed him the sketch, he told me it was nice, the two friends kibbitzed a bit and he returned to his seat, and I did a quick shading of the sketch.

Sketching on location is special, even if nobody talks to you. But when they do, it’s really special. I’m convinced that there are people in the world who think my sketches are horrible and a waste of time…but they never talk to me.

Urban Sketching, Nigeria Style

Posted on February 24, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Now that the Samurai exhibit has left our museum I’ve been concentrating more on the Nigerian exhibit. The more I sketch it the more I gain insights into life as an urban Nigerian of the past. While many (most?) of the masks, crests and statues that make up the exhibit were ceremonial in nature, the early Nigerians used carvings to grace everything. If they needed to stopper a bottle, they made a plug with a head or statue on top of it. Combs were carved from wood and had ornate handles. Even spoons and ladles were handsomely carved. Because of this, there’s a lot to sketch and because of the complexity of these objects, it’s the best sketching practice an urban sketcher could want.

Here are some examples of what I’ve done recently. All were done in an Stillman and Birn Epsilon sketchbook (5.5×8.5) and all with a Pilot Prera pen filled with Noodler’s Lexington Gray.

Color comes from watercolor pencils as they’re just more convenient in museum setting than are my actual watercolors.

Have you done any sketching in museums? If so, do you find it fun?

Urban Sketchers Always Have Things To Draw

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Larry Marshall

If your interests lie in drawing naked people, you need a model. If you paint landscapes, you need to go to pretty places. If you’re into aviation art, you need to hang out at airports or aviation museums. But if you’re an urban sketcher, all you have to do is live your life with a sketchbook in your hand. There’s always something to sketch. I’m an urban sketcher.

I went for some blood tests yesterday and, of course, I had my sketching stuff with me. From past experience I knew I’d have 10-15 minutes to wait before Dracula called me to be poked and so I checked in, sat down, and got out my sketchbook. I thought about sketching a wheelchair that was sitting in the corner, or the receptionist’s area. But I noticed a steady flow of people walking up to the receptionist, where you have to shove our paperwork through a slot; they confirm who you are, and then the receptionist provides instructions which mostly amount to ‘go sit down and we’ll call you.’

So I started quick-sketching these people. It was a study in quickly grabbing the outlines of coats, purses and legs because you couldn’t see their heads, which were behind partitions that divided the 3 reception windows. And it was fun. My waiting time went by too quickly.

Here are three examples of those sketches. Simple, good practice, and fun. Done in a Strathmore ‘toned’ paper sketchbook with a Pilot Metropolitan and Waterman Absolute Brown ink. A bit of it was quickly washed into a form of shading using a waterbrush.

Museum Sketching – A Location Sketcher’s Winter Salvation

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Last summer was my first as a location sketcher – actually it was my first summer as any kind of sketcher. I fell in love with the process and excitement of being out on the street, soaking up the sun and ambiance while sketching. Quickly the early fears I had about people talking to me became one of the joys of the sketching experience.

And so I faced winter somewhat depressed as it becomes too cold for man nor beast to be on the streets of Quebec and I thought I’d have to do my sketching at home, in my office. That has never interested me much, but then a couple fellow sketchers said, “We sometimes sketch at the museum – want to come?” and my world changed overnight.

I got a permit to sketch at the art museum. I became a member of our Musee de la Civilisation, which also gave me access three other, smaller museums. And I’ve met new people, had new challenges, experimented with new materials and learned a lot about seeing complex objects while drawing same with minimal equipment. I’m sketching as much this winter as I did during summer. The subjects have changed, but I feed my desire to sketch real things, in real time, without having to resort to drawing my spatula and coffee cup (grin).

If that weren’t enough, Yvan Breton has become a good friend who is an architect and long-time artist. He’s become both a companion when I sketch and my mentor. His style and mine are quite different but he’s taught me more in the past couple months than I learned in my entire first year of sketching. I confess that all the information he’s provided has my poor old brain scattered and flailing to keep up with all the ‘gotta try that…’ feelings I’m having right now but hey, that’s part of the fun.

Nigerian mask, done in Stillman & Birn Alpha (5.5x8.5) sketchbooks, Pilot Prera/Noodler's Lex Gray.

Nigerian mask, done in Stillman & Birn Alpha (5.5×8.5) sketchbooks, Pilot Prera/Noodler’s Lex Gray. Partially sketched while Yvan was sketching me.

The sketch above is of me, by Yvan. He did this “quick sketch” while I was sketching in the Nigeria exhibit at the museum last Tuesday. It’s one of my prized possessions.

I’ll complete this post by showing you several of the sketches I’ve had opportunity to do in the last week. I think you’ll agree that the variety is far greater than my summer sketches, which are mostly buildings – my first love.

Another mask, S&B sketchbook, Pilot Prera/Lex Gray

While we’ve sketched some of the Nigerian exhibit already, we’re starting to spend more time there because the Samurai exhibit is leaving on Sunday. The funny thing about the Nigerian exhibit is that it’s full of great items to sketch but, it seems, they don’t become ‘great’ until you actually start looking at them as a sketching subject. One is deceived by a walk-around in the exhibit and you conclude the items are a bunch of very similar, primitive sculptures. Primitive yes, similar, not so much. So many shapes, so many surfaces. Wow!

We spent last Sunday at the Musee de Amerique Francais, where I sketched Genghis Khan, or at least a mannequin wearing the Genghis Khan suit used in the movie Night at the Museum. This was done in a Strathmore 400 “gray” sketchbook using Noodler’s Brown in a Pilot Prera. Lots of fun, though all those squares drove me nuts.

When I was done, I turned my attention to some large paper mache heads used by the Cirque de Soleil in their show. These were ‘I gotta draw those’ subjects but I approached them with some trepidation. In the end they were lots of fun. Stillman & Birn Epsilon sketchbook, Pilot Prera/Lexington Gray and Faber-Castell watercolor pencils for this one.

I’ll conclude by sharing my full Samurai suit sketch. I’d promised myself that I’d do one before the exhibit left… just as soon as my skills began to match the amazing subjects. I didn’t quite make it on the skills end but, before the exhibit leaves on Sunday, I did sketch this one. I apologize for the absolutely weird positioning of the mannequin. That’s not me distorting it; that’s how they had it positioned. All of them were somewhat unnatural in their orientations in my opinion. This one done in my Stillman & Birn Epsilon sketchbook, Pilot Prera, Faber-Castell watercolor pencils.

If you scroll back through the blog you’ll find lots of Samurai helmets, sketches of Joe Fafard sculptures, other Nigerian masks, and other stuff. Museum sketching is really fun. If you haven’t already, give it a try. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.