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

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.

Well, this may be helpful. I worked with videographer Hiromi Sogo to give y’all some sense of how I manage, or try, to sketch people who are not posing but rather engaged in some activity. This I do and have done, as those who follow me know, for more than four decades. This practice has helped me in many ways, but greatly in one in particular. When I had the chance to draw in court, I was already up-to-speed with capturing people in motion.

Here are close ups of the drawing used in the video: just a note, when transferring the video to this platform, some of the soundtrack drops out; a glit I look to correct and avoid in future videos. Learning curve stuff, my bad.

As mentioned in the video, I number the drawings in the order they were begun. To my eyes, there was a lot of “meat on the bone”, I.e. an interesting looking dude holding great poses about concentration, wearing a shiny, puffy jacket made more dramatic by the raking light that accentuated surface features with the cast shadows of near and mid distant structures. Drawing  multiple perspectives or postures on the same page makes the transition from one position to the next easier as the subject moves and/or returns to a similar posture allowing you to add or complete the drawing. Afterwards, it also makes for better side by side comparisons since you’re not flipping back and forth to compare and contrast drawings.

You can see the preliminary or searching sketch for which I used a light Flesh tone. That establishes the general silhouette and will be a place holder if the subject suddenly moves just after I’ve begun drawing. I managed to knock in a good deal of his face and hair but he moved before I could get to his hand. When he returned to this pose about 45 minutes later, my “notes” were in place and I was able to pick immediately where I’d left off.

Evident in these drawings ing s is my use of several tools, one very important amount them are my fingers as you can see the marks left by my fingerprints.

Those fingerprints create hatch marks that are quite distinct from the hatching created with a stylus be it pen or pencil. Varied marks have great appeal to me in that they can enrich the drawing and  their combined effect is to increase the descriptive nature of the marks. But another, very crucial reason I draw with an array of different tools is to take advantage of the inherent attributes of a given tool and by doing so save myself time. Most important in drawing a dynamic subject where you’ve no idea when your subject could move or altogether leave, is to draw efficiently. Why overwork a small nib when a big brush affords greater coverage. Fingerprints create multiple hatch marks simultaneously that are also very difficult to emulate with the stroke of a pen. An inky finger will come in handy if you should want a smudged tone. Add to this collective of mark making, a variety of hues and the drawing gains in richness and description. For the combined effect simply examine the close up below of figure #5.

Drawings were done done with a Faber-Castell Basic Black Leather fountain pen filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink and F-C Pitt Artist Pens on a Stillman and Birn Gamma Series sketchbook (S&B is now a subsidiary of Clairefontaine) which takes ink and pencil nicely and can handle watercolor, plus has a little pebbly surface that creates nice textures when smudging or scumbling.

Some end of the decade urban sketching.

Working with various fountain pens filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink and Pitt Artist Brush Pens in Stillman and Birn Gamma Series sketchbook. #draw #urbansketching #stillmanandbirn #fountainpen #deatramentis

Some recent nudes from sessions at The Palette and Chisel. Pitt Artist Pens on Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook.