Sunday, October 19, 2008

Beautiful things: part I, Siratus beauii

In keeping with my efforts to write about drawings as I finish them, this drawing was just finished recently. I was in Bermuda earlier in the year and when visiting the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (just on the left as you come into Hamilton from Middle Road), I spent some time in their Jack Lightborne shell collection. It is an amazing collection of shells from all over the world. There were many there that caught my eye. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that this one was almost pure white, with only a few pale tan streaks -- this made for an interesting challenge. The shell was labeled Siratus beauii and was found near Guadeloupe in the French West Indies. The species falls into the family by the name muricidae -- all members of this family are carnivores and they prey primarily on bivalves and marine snails. After I got home and finished the drawing, I did a little further research: their range extends from Florida down to Uruguay and their morphology and coloring can be quite varied. A very pale example of the species, such as this one, does not seem to be very common (at least if one uses the sample size of the 10-20 images available on the web as comparison... probably not a good mechanism for determining frequency). It seems that the species was renamed Chicoreus beauii; both names were given in 1857 by P. Fischer and Bernardi (at least according to this online source). The shell has also been featured on a Brazilian stamp (shown at this link).




Siratus beauii, 2008.
Pencil on paper, 7" x 5".

Friday, October 10, 2008

Artistic interests, part 2: Birds

Image: Blue Tit, Cyanistes caeruleus
The Blue Tit, Cyanistes caeruleus
(Blue Tit, 2007. Pencil on paper, 12" x 9".)


Part of the challenge that intrigues me with drawing birds is trying to catch them in a position that portrays them accurately and captures an essential part of their behavior -- whether that is a bird which is particularly curious, flighty, aggressive, or sure of itself. Artists since the development of high speed cameras have a distinct advantage over those before cameras in their ability to both work from still images taken of the birds when alive (as opposed to working from solely from memory or stuffed animals) and the ability, due to those still images, to see accurately how animals move. (Recall all those old paintings of horses and hounds in typical English hunting scenes where the horses' legs are all incorrectly splayed out because the mechanics of the movement of the legs of a running horse was not understood.)

The ubiquity of bird feeders in England provides ample opportunity to see the same birds day after day and to see the feeding behaviors of different birds. The small, flighty Blue Tit (the first image, above) spends more of its time looking around for predators than it does trying to dig out nuts from the feeder. When it does dig out nuts, it is fast and furious, its head hammering away madly before it is compelled to glance nervously over its shoulder for any approaching trouble. His constant readiness to spring back into flight was part of what I wanted to capture with the drawing.

The Great Tit, Parus major, is a larger bird and much less flighty. He can become accustomed to movement behind a window and feeds at a more leisurely pace. He also keeps a watchful eye out for predators like the magpie, who will sometimes feast on the unwary, but appears less concerned than the Blue Tit. I did two drawings of the Great Tit in 2007, a small sketch of a complete bird at the same feeder in London and then a larger, more detailed drawing of the head. The second drawing was a good experimentation with a 6B pencil, which was used for some of the black highlights in the small feathers of the head. It is funny - a 2B pencil looks pretty black when that is the only pencil that one has used on a page, but when you then add more shadows with the 6B pencil, the 2B pales in comparison. [sorry, couldn't resist]

Image: Great Tit
A small sketch of the Great Tit
(Great tit #1, 2007. Pencil on paper, 5" x 7".)


Image: Great Tit
A larger, detailed drawing of the Great Tit, Parus major
(Great tit, 2007. Pencil on paper, 12" x 9".)


One of the interesting things about drawing is trying to bring out an object's three dimensional nature and to try to lift the object off the paper towards the viewer. Birds are interesting to draw in this regard in that they have lots of curved surfaces - eyes, body, legs, talons - this gives you many areas to add three dimensionality and show that the areas are all illuminated from a constant direction (if, indeed, they are). One of my goals in my drawing is to portray three dimensionality accurately enough that the person looking at the drawing doesn't even notice. It seems to me that there are two approaches with this kind of thing -- either be obvious about not trying to show 3D, or do it well enough that people don't notice that you have done it correctly. The only time people will actively notice the 3D nature is if you have something that is out of place -- then the internal comparison-with-reality-checker will speak up. As said, I strive towards the latter approach. I have also enjoyed the challenge of reducing colored feathers down to shades of gray that are of (I hope) the correct tonal character. Perhaps at some point I will branch out into colored pencils for a drawing like this, but not yet.

More later; thanks for reading,

Nicholas
PS -- By the way, if you like either of the larger drawings and would like to send reprodutions of them as greeting cards, never fear, I liked them enough, too, to have them made into blank-inside greeting cards with interesting information on the back. You can buy them here (scroll down slightly). Your purchase will be supporting the artist, too, which would be great!

Artistic interests

There are many things in the world that I am interested in drawing. The overarching theme for me is that I like to draw beautiful things. I feel that you sharpen your sense of observation and have a better sense of the way things work by looking at drawings and by the act of drawing. In my drawing, I try to focus on distinct areas of interest, bringing to light portions of the scene that may otherwise be lost to the surrounding detail.

Of the things that I am interested in drawing (animals and plants, fossils, architecture, and people, just to name a few), many of them fall into themes that I would like to explore as my drawings progress. For example, one of the crises facing our generation is that of the human-induced extinction of other species (with the potential for our own extinction along the way). Our potential failure as caretakers of this planet is of utmost importance in my mind. I was inspired to start exploring the topic of extinction when I was in Bermuda earlier this year.

At the Bermuda Aquarium and Zoo, there are about four or five Golden Lion Tamarins (
Leontopithecus rosalia) in a big outdoor exhibit that you can walk through. The animals are beautiful. They are also highly endangered. They are New World monkeys and we have degraded their natural habitat down to just a few spots in Brazil. There are about 500 to 1000 animals in the wild and another 500 or so in zoos around the world. (There is more info at this U. Wisconsin external website.)

I photographed several of the monkeys while I was at the aquarium and then drew one of them soon after I got back.

Image: Golden Lion Tamarin
I thought that the look in his face was one of great sadness (yes, I am anthropomorphizing). The first position of the monkey that I drew was lit in a way that the eye was highly reflective and you couldn't see the iris and pupil. I was also inspired to work on something much larger, so I thought I would try a slightly different view and would draw all of the body that was visible to me in a separate photograph that I had taken. This was the first relatively large drawing that I was attempting (well, I consider 19" x 24" quite large, given the time that it takes); I was very happy with the way it turned out. So happy, in fact, that I even had posters made of the drawing (and as a shameless commercial plug, you can buy them on the "purchase" page of my website). The second drawing of the tamarin I called "Contemplating extinction?". It would be sad if we let them go extinct.
Image: Contemplating extinction?
These images are also shown on my website: "Golden Lion Tamarin" and "Contemplating extinction?".