Buttnekkiddoodles

A couple weeks ago my dear pal Alexandria and I felt a need for a visit in these isolating times, so, we each masked up and met for a 3 hour visit at Calvary Cemetery.
Calvary is a modest size cemetery which sits between Chicago and Evanston along the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s very open being flat and not forested with minimal trees and plantings. It is quite pleasant, very bright and enjoys the benefit of the lake’s breeze.
Alex and I brought chairs and I proceeded to sketch her as she surfed the net while we talked of how we were coping with the extraordinary times.
I worked on a Stillman & Birn Nova Series Beige sketchbook. The warm tinted Pages provide a great tonal base allowing a selective use of a brighter value by adding white as I did here with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pen. The page has just enough tooth that when I dragged or rubbed an inky finger across the surface I was able to emulate the surface and look of the tombstone behind Alex. Yes, those are my fingerprints which when inky create a perfect look of pine needles and grass.
Tools included a Graf von Faber-Castell Chevron fountain pen filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink, Pitt Artist Pens of various grays and nib sizes and the S&B sketchbook mentioned above. #Stillmanandbirn #fabercastellusa

Just came back from Northwestern University Hospital, where, I had an ultrasound performed on the veins of my legs after looking into a mysterious tender and swollen spot that appeared four days ago. All clear. It seems our creampuff Uncle Darn just tore some muscles. Cue the Stones…”What a drag it is getting old”. Pictured, my clothes patiently waiting for the procedure. Fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens on Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. On the second sketch, got that quickie in during the ultrasound procedure. Should have had the soundtrack for The Jetsons, Star Trek, & Lost In Space. I was so impressed with my US techie Vanessa, that I promoted her right there on the spot to Doctor ‘n’ errythang! Yes, that is a very exacting representation of my knee. Y’all know I’m a realist. Lettering done once I got home. Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, fountain pen, on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. Thanks to the terrific staff at a great hospital. And thanks to Medicare that I can get quality care. To those who have dogged the prospects of universal health care, Medicare (thank you very much FDR/Eisenhower/LBJ) or take health care professionals for granted, “You can k!$5 M? @zz”!!

Dreary weather at end of April. Stuck indoors because of the pandemic and cold wet day, so, making the most of it by sagging a sketch from the window by my drawing table. Giving y’all a glimpse of the building across the street from me. Not delighted by the final results and had already grown tiered of drawing it as it was being erected.

At this point I need to make a full disclosure as I am now receiving funding as an “influencer”. My sponsors are Faber-Castell which should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed me for any of the past 12 years and knows that I like their product and have worked as a demonstrator on their behalf. For a number of those years I traveled the country demonstrating tools and techniques in the brick and mortar world of art stores as well as at trade shows. I’ve also made my way to teach and lecture at colleges and schools around the country, an experience I greatly enjoyed. All during my travel to these venues I documented my treks here and there and there on the Internet on this site and on the internet as Don Colley’s Road Trip. Faber-Castell was the entity that made all that possible and now I am very appreciative for their sponsorship of my online blogs.

In addition to Faber-Castell, I’m most delighted to be working with Clairefontaine and Stillman & Birn (now owned by the parent company Clairefontaine). I wholly support both lines of paper and sketchbooks by these companies and have made considerable use of their products as you may have noticed in my posts over the years.

There are loads of wonderful products in the marketplace to work with and I’m a big advocate for experimentation and trying them out. When I find pens or sketchbooks I enjoy, I keep going to the well more so these days.

As always, this format is suited to me answering your questions and I do encourage followers to strike up a dialogue regarding the craft of drawing, the tools of the trade, or the themes I may be working around.

The above drawing was made with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, an F-C Basic Black Leather fountain pen using a waterproof ink, I’m currently using several as long as they hold up to over washes and don’t clog my pens. Mind you, regular cleaning is necessary for any fountain pen ink that claims it is waterproof. The sketchbook is a Goldline Watercolor Sketchbook by Clairefontaine.

#fabercastellusa #clairefontaine

Week 4 at The Human Anatomy Lab and my subject was the same cadaver Virginia Ferrante-Iqbal has been continuing to dissect. Now laying face up with the skin and subcutaneous fat removed from the left side, it is a dramatic demonstration of how thick those layers were. Virginia commented on how heavy and difficult to lift the tray was that contained the removed skin and fat.

I again showed up without the ideal color selection, thus the muscles wound up appearing too brownish in my drawing. Pitt Artist Pens on Toned paper.

Yesterday I had the honor to attend an Artist Anatomy Sketching Session organized by Virginia Ferrante-Iqbal at the RUSH Human Anatomy Lab run by Director James Williams PhD. Before I switched majors to art after three years of college, I had been a bio/chem major. And while I had certainly been in labs and had dissected a few small creatures, I never advanced to the human anatomy labs. The first thing is you will notice a slight hint of formaldehyde but the lab was very well ventilated so that was never an issue. Then you don the gown and enter the main room where there are perhaps a dozen or so tables/gurneys with cadavers in blue tarps. Our subject was revealed and as you can see from my sketches had the skin removed from the body’s left side. A moment of respectful silence and gratitude to the donor, then I got down to business. The session is 3 hours. One aspect I wondered about was my palette selection as I packed my gear the night before. I used Pitt Artist Pens which have a wide range of color but my selection left out some hues I’ll look to include next week. I brought a clipboard as one of my sketchbooks, a Stillman & Birn Nova Series, was a soft cover and wouldn’t have given me much support as I stood to draw while holding my sketchbook. The other book, a Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook had a hard book cover and was well suited to draw and hold on it’s own. I have lots of anatomy books but the clarity you find in most of those books will be different than your experience looking directly upon a cadaver. Connective tissue and the direction or grain of muscle tissue may prove much more confusing than a diagrammatically rendered illustration. That, will be part of the challenge. To draw as faithfully as you see the forms and tissue, or help articulate the structure. An exciting opportunity. There are openings for this lab which meets over the next seven weeks. My thanks to Virginia Ferrante-Iqbal and Dr. Jim Williams.

I returned to the Human Anatomy Lab at Rush Hospital last night and continued drawing from the same cadaver featured last week. More dissection had taken place, as shown here, where the trapezius, still attached to the skull ( the external occipital protuberance to be more exact) having been laid across the towel covering the cadaver’s head. Other muscles around the shoulder/neck area have been partially removed to show substructure. The main muscle of the buttocks, the gluteus maximus has also been partially removed to reveal deeper tissue and the sciatic nerve. In future drawings I will clearly label the muscle groups, bones and key features.