Odd Little Guy From Greek Theatre

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

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)

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

Polar Bear Sketching As Winter Approaches

It’s becoming difficult to sketch outdoors in Quebec City.  It’s comfortable to walk as long as one wears proper attire but to sit and sketch for any period of time is beyond my capacity to endure.

So now the scramble to find indoor subject matter begins.  Claudette and I met at the Université Laval library and their small natural history exhibit.  It’s a small display and we’re running out of sketching possibilities but I decided to draw the head of a polar bear who, I suspect, had ducked into the library just to get out of the cold.  Sketchers aren’t the only ones that find Quebec winters harsh.

I had fun doing this in my Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook, though it’s only a 6×8 and I would have like a larger format for this sketch.  Have I mentioned how much I like Faber-Castell Albrecht-Durer watercolor pencils?  They’re the only ones I’ve found where a waterbrush can completely eliminate the pencil lines.  Anyways, I hope you like Mr Polar Bear, though he might be a she.

polar bear

Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook, Pilot Falcon w/Platinum Carbon Black ink

Sketching Mobile Homes

2014-10-20shell1In the display at our local library is a cabinet full of mobile homes.  As I like drawing architecture it seemed fitting that I draw some houses used by animals that aren’t human so I chose these two.

I drew them in a Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook using my Pilot/Namiki Falcon and Platinum Carbon Black ink.  Color comes from Faber-Castell Albrecht-Durer watercolor pencils.

2014-10-20shell2

Sketching The Past

This is the time of year that a street sketcher, living in a part of the world that turns dark and cold for five months, starts thinking about what he’s going to draw for the next few months.  One thing that’s occurred to me is that there are many things I simply can’t draw ‘on location’ because they simply don’t exist any longer.  Why not draw those things, from photos or museum examples?

So, when I was sketching at a small display in the Laval University library, I decided to draw the passenger pigeon that was on display.  It’s 100 years ago, this year, that we finally ‘got the last one’ of some five BILLION of these birds that once inhabited North America.  Enterprising European immigrants, showing their mettle, blew every last one of them from the sky.  What a proud accomplishment.  It might be ok if we would have said “oops…we shouldn’t do that again” but we continue to do it, over and over and over.  I heard on the news the other day that there are currently 50% fewer animals on our planet than there were just 30 years ago.  How much longer can we continue to be so stupid?  Not much longer unless we wake up and stop our denial about what’s going on.

But enough of an old biologist grousing about what unbridled disregard for everything but money is doing to our world.  Back to sketching.  I had never seen a passenger pigeon before.  It looks very much like a very large, somewhat elongated mourning dove and certainly more lean than it’s domestic pigeon cousin.  I drew this one in a Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook with a Pilot/Namiki Falcon pen.  The color comes from Faber-Castell Albrecht-Durer watercolor pencils.  I love these pencils and every time I get them out I wonder why I don’t use them more.  The wing primaries should be darker.

passenger pigeon

To Pick Apples Or Sketch – That Was The Question

We apple picking in St. Nicolas on Sunday.  It’s a great place on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.  Very agricultural, very beautiful.  As I always do, I took my sketching stuff with me but didn’t figure I’d get a chance to use it.  We were foraging.

Apple picking is pretty light duty.  We had a large bag and wandered around pulling the red orbs off the tree.  Made me wish that money really did grow on trees as that would really be fun.

We’d filled a bag of McIntosh apples and had started on a new bag, to be filled with Lobos, when I saw this old, three-legged ladder.  I couldn’t resist and handed the bag to my wife, saying “I’ll do it quickly.”  She continued picking and I sat down, pulling out a small sketchbook of brown paper and my TWSBI Mini.

I became a kid magnet and a bunch of kids surrounded me to watch.  It was fun.  They were all very young (less than 10) and very shy but curious of this big person doing what they do all the time.  None of them were art critics.  Wanting to put on a show, I guess, I sort of cut short my actual sketching and got out some watercolor pencils.  I showed them around and then added a bit of color to the sketch.  In the end, I had an incomplete sketch but a fond memory.  Location sketching at its best.

3-legged ladder

TWSBI Mini, Platinum Carbon Black, watercolor pencils