Buttnekkiddoodles

The one place I thought I could go during this time of pandemic lockdowns with Chicago Police dispersing gatherings of a half dozen or more was a cemetery. So Giamila and I agreed to meet up, masked up as well, at Chicago’s elegant Graceland Cemetery.
In general, cemeteries are very sparsely attended so I was a bit surprised to find dozens of people, solitary, and groups of five, roaming the ground. Kids were zooming about on bicycles, a practice generally discouraged by cemeteries. Many unmasked. Lady G and I sat by this tombstone for an hour and a half while I drew and then roamed the grounds, her first time ever at Graceland.
If you have the opportunity I highly recommend a visit wherein you will find the tombstones of luminaries such as Louis Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Mies Van Der Rohe, Daniel Burnham, Dorthy Page, Pinkerton, Cyrus McCormick, and many others after whom Chicago streets, Parks and buildings are named.

Pitt Artist Pens, fountain pen on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #fabercastellusa #clairefontaine

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

Back into the Human Anatomy Lab at RUSH Hospital twice this week past. Friday I joined Professor Dr. Christopher Ferrigno as his students worked on their dissection assignments.

In the above drawing of a cadaver with considerable dissection on the charts and abdominal cavity, I chose to create a grisaille, or monochrome Gray scale drawing. This features tone and contour but in lacking a wide range of hues or color, makes distinguishing organs much more of a challenge. You may see this trying to differentiate between the heart, seen just above the chin in this view, and the liver which lies directly behind the heart and to the right of it, again relative to this view. What can give greater clarity when using a monochrome scale, would be 1 – employing a subtle shift in grays from cool to warm. The cool gray having a slight blue cast, while the warm gray more of a brown shade. 2 – The strength or width of you countour lines will help distinguish organs one from the other and foreground from background. The character of the organ structure may also affect the contour. So the main lobe of the liver would be a smooth, softly curving line, but the contours of the small intestines would consist of multiple curves of various radius like a thick ribbon folding back on itself again and again. 3 – the surface textures could be very smooth, striated, spotted, mottled, rippled, dimpled, shiny, or covered with small irregular globules of fat. Paying close attention to these sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle distinction will keep your drawings of human tissue from melding in a confusing mass of goulash.

As students work to access organs deeper within the thoracic cavity they have a need to move the intestines out of their way. They were instructed to gather the intestines into a bundle, referred to by  Prof. Ferrigno as the “bouquet”, and set that to the side, as shown in the drawing above. Ink on Toned paper and a Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolor Sketchbook.