Tucson Sketching Trip

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Some people like their Christmas to be decorated with snowmen and conifer boughs weighed down with snow. I prefer to see lots of green, preferably steamy palms and junglish things.   

Christmas Cholla

This year I compromised and opted for a sketching trip with saguaro cactus and Christmas cholla. Contrary to my high hopes, I didn't escape the cold much, it being 25° several nights as I camped out in my rental Jeep SUV in the desert.

Saguaros in the Catalina Mts.

Actually, I had a lovely time during the days, when the temperatures ranged between 50° and 70,° but suffice it to say that spending from 5:30pm (when the sun goes down) till 9am the next morning (when it has finally gotten warm enough to bear getting up) inside an SUV is not ideal.

My "camper"

I had come prepared to camp out, with a little cat food can camp stove which I had made myself from an aluminum cat food can and a paper punch after finding instructions on YouTube given by this tattooed dude. 

The stove is sitting  in the skillet

BTW, you only need about half as many holes as he suggests. I also figured out that if you put the stove in a skillet and shape aluminum foil around it as I show in my photo, it makes a fine windbreak and confines the heat to where you want it. In the skillet, the flame is protected and the skillet and foil also protect your surroundings from wayward heat.

The stove here is out of sight UNDER the flattish pan, which is half full of my coffee water heating up, and the uppermost can is full of ravioli which I was warming up in the hot water.  It's a super stove in terms of being lightweight and taking up NO space, but you should experiment with it before you go camping to figure out how much fuel you'll need.  If you can't find Heet, denatured alcohol will work, but it's much more expensive. 

Ready to sketch

I sketched and journaled every day. While most of the time, I simply sat to sketch in the sand or perched on a rock, there were times when fallen cactus spines made this unwise. If my canvas chair was handy (I bought it on arrival for $6.95 at a sporting goods store) I'd set it up and draw in comfort. I sat in front of this cactus for a long time, sketching its demise, an astonishing sight.

Dead saguaro

For the first week, I stayed in Gilbert Ray County Park, a marvelous little campground west of Tucson in Tucson Mountain Park. I could step off my campsite into seemingly untouched saguaro/cholla/mesquite desert, and sketch to my heart's content.  

The people there were super nice ~ both the people who looked after it and the people in RVs and campers whom I met there: Jim, who offered me a heater to use during the cold nights, and made coffee for me in the chilly mornings; the folks who needed an aspirin for a hangover, then invited me for breakfast and admired my sketches...I met a lot of nice people on this trip.

Just across the road from the campground was a series of nature trails with lots more sketching opportunities.

Don't swing your arms whenwalking oast chollas!

This Barrel Cactus was one of many along the trail.  And walking along a trail through the Cholla was an other-worldly experience!

Daniel had lent me a cellphone for this trip, which meant that I could access my email and explain to people trying to order books that I would take care of it after my return in January..


Since I was spending as many as 14-15 hours in the "camper," I had brought along a tablet upon which I could read ebooks. That proved to be a real sanity saver as I could wrap up in my sleeping bag and fleece blankets to keep warm and read through the many long hours of darkness ~ after I finished sketching, of course.   

In the future, I'm determined to choose winter destinations SOUTH of the equator,  where it will be summer and there are more daylight hours than dark hours. Fifteen hours is WAY too long to spend cramped up in a car, and at 25°. there aren't a lot of other options when you're 20 miles from town.  Like I said, the days were lots better than the nights. Ah but the days!!!!

 

Great Horned Owl

Harris's Hawk

Gilbert Ray campground is fewer than ten miles from the famous Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. If you ever get a chance to go there, don't miss it.  One of their features is the raptor free-flight performances at 10 and 2 every day.  

I was able to photograph owls and hawks that you normally would spend months or years (or never) getting this close to.  

 These photos were taken during the birds' performance. They were all flying free in the desert, under no restraints. But if you'll notice, the Great Horned Owl and the Redtail perched on the same branch.

Barn Owl

Red-tailed Hawk

Great Horned Owl

     









There were other marvels at the Museum, as well.  I had a great time sketching the Desert Bighorn Sheep.  I suppose I MIGHT have seen Bighorns if I'd hiked to the top  of the mountains east of Tucson. But not likely.  

Their enclosure is about as real-looking as you're likely to find, and they're apparently contented, the ewe having produced offspring more than once while living there. She's the one with the smaller horns.   
There is other wildlife that chooses to live in the museum, as well, it being such a nice place.  This lovely cardinal apparently lives on the grounds.  
 
Unfortunately, campers are only allowed to stay at Gilbert Ray for seven days, then they shoo you out to make your way in the world.  There are more campgrounds east of Tucson, but before I went I visited Saguaro National Park (West) to see the famous Hohokam Petroglyphs, which perch on a nearby hilltop.

Hohokam petroglyphs

Here are the sketches I managed, peering around others as they came to respectfully examine them. 

I wonder what these petroglyphs were meant to convey.......... 

I ended up with twenty five pages of sketches ~ not bad for about twelve actual sketching days (that doesn't count flying-to-and-fro time or provisioning days spent at the grocery and sporting goods stores). 

In order to do as much sketching as possible, I didn't take the time to color ANY of the sketches. Evenings in the cold car didn't lend themselves to artwork because cold fingers don't easily grasp the ballpoint pen, which was my tool of choice here, or watercolor pencils, which I had intended to use for color.   I have my photographs from which I can add color here at home if I want.  But do I want to?  I may leave this sketchbook black-and-white. 
 
 Uh oh, I've run out of time.   More later!  Any comments about color or no color?  

New Workbook ~ Drawing Eagles, Hawks & Owls!

It's ready!
I redid (totally) the Drawing Raptors book into the Drawing Eagles, Hawks & Owls Workbook, and I expect it's going to be popular. If I hadn't written it, I might want to buy it m'self {grin}. Actually, it's the birds that make it so attractive. Talk about scene stealers.

Looks as though it's taking me about a month to prepare these workbooks. I thought they'd go a lot faster, but I don't want to do a slap-dash-hope-it-works kind of job, so.....

There's a lot of meat in this one. It is probably most useful for intermediate artists, although a determined beginner could probably do just fine with it. As usual, I suggest starting out first with the Nature Sketching Basics Workbook to get a good grounding in basic drawing techniques (by the way, I've decided to leave Nature Sketching Basics at the lower $9.95 price indefinitely so people won't hesitate to start out with it, the price being so reasonable).

Most people have trouble drawing birds because they can't quite envision the bird's structure underneath those feathers and how it affects the way the bird stands, moves and flies. I know it made a lot of difference to my bird drawings after I tucked some bird anatomy into my skull.

So I've put in a couple of skeleton diagrams (one is actually flying) from my days of working at the Fish & Wildlife Forensics Lab years ago. And I've gone into detail about how the eyes work so that the artist can figure out how to position them in the raptor's face. There are pages about wings and feathers, talons and foot scales and tails ~ how they work and how to draw them, plus the three obligatory pages of Sketching Basics, Drawing Tips, and Shading Principles.

The best part, to me, was reconstructing a sketching session I'd had with a horned owl last year. I included a 3-page step-by-step tutorial on the making of the owl's portrait (along with photos I'd serendipitously taken at the time), including my thought processes as I went through each step. There's another tutorial on how to get the best sketches when working with a moving target, with a page out of one of my sketchbooks showing my process with a wiggly screech owl.

And if you know anything about my teaching style, you'll expect me to have included some practice with eye, foot, and beak templates to help you jump-start your sketching process.

The idea is that, like a musician, if you memorize your scales and practice your fingering, you will have the basics for quickly learning a music piece. If you start out with no practice, it will take you ages to figure out each tune. So yes, there are templates up the kazoo.

There are also some good feather exercises,to give you some "stock movements" for quick creation of feathers. You can change it to fit the situation, but you already know how to draw that feather texture, so a slight twitch will give you a brand-new look.

There's even a bit on note-taking as you sketch. I just have to include a note I found next to a sketch I made of a young vulture. I'd completely forgotten about it (well, it WAS twenty years ago) but when I read it the whole scene came flooding back: "...defensive sound, much like a man snoring or water going very fast down drain -- a rattling hiss. 3-4 seconds on, 1-2 seconds off, continuous when very upset." I not only could recall the sound, but also remembered that I did a super-quick outline then withdrew from the enclosure where I'd been sketching so that the little guy could relax again. I got the rest of it by peeking at it through a crack in the door. Even so, it has to be one of my favorite sketches of all time.

I know that people who download this workbook will be eager to go out and sketch eagles and hawks and owls, but I strongly suggest doing a bit of preparation and learning some stuff at home before going out to sketch live raptors, particularly if someone is going to be holding the bird on the fist while you draw.

Knowing the basics will make it a much more enjoyable session with vastly better results than if you go into it cold. I speak from experience, and from the experience of my students ~ they always wished we'd been able to schedule at least another day of workshop to practice drawing the birds from photos before we went to the raptor rehab place to draw.

To that end, I've included a gallery of copyright-free photos of hawk, eagle and owl for the artist to practice on. These are pictures I took myself at Wildlife Images (see the previous blog entry), so I have full control over their copyright. This eagle is a sample, as is the owl photo above.

The hardest part of creating Drawing Eagles Hawks & Owls was having to leave a lot of really cool stuff out. For instance, I really wanted to include these little sawwhet owls in the workbook, but there just wasn't enough room. So here they are just for fun. Aren't they sweet?

So there you are, the latest in my Workshop Workbook Series. Like the others, I have it up on the Workshop Workbook Page at the lower introductory price ($9.95) until April 20, when all the prices go up to $15.95.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I still have a couple of workbooks to go:

• Natural Landscape Sketching Basics
• Travel and Nature Journaling (both sketching and writing)

But I might take a little break, a couple o' weeks, mebbe, before I sail into those. I think they'll both take a little longer to do, and besides, Lorna, one of my workbook "students" (she just downloaded Nature Sketching Details yesterday) asked me to slow down a bit so that she could save up for the next one.

And it's surely going to be spring out there someday, although it snowed for awhile this afternoon and then it rained and then a huge windstorm roared through. I've just about despaired of ever getting outside to the wildflowers again (if there still ARE any!). This is Oregon, for heaven's sake! It's supposed to be warm out there in April!

Wildlife Sketching Basics Workshop 5/2-3/09

Oops, missed my deadline... I'd hoped to blog the Wildlife Sketching Workshop before I held last weekend's Journaling workshop, but there's too much happening. F'rinstance, I'm sitting here at my computer damp and steamy from planting my little garden in a light misting drizzle. The poor little plants were getting wimpy sitting on the kitchen counter, and a rainy day is perfect to plant....so the blogging is just now beginning while I am trying to keep warm-though-moist.

On the other hand, hopefully, I have set out my cherry, grape and yellow tomatoes before they wilted ENTIRELY away, planted basil and cilantro, salad nasturtiums and a stevia (the "sweet" plant), and tried to get my sprinkler system going. Since it's raining, it's hard to tell if I got it right, though. It's a paltry garden this year. I have been too busy to poke my nose out the door (see last week's entry. And I'm working on a new project now, too.). That's the garden, big tree pots plunked down on my steep wooded hillside with a deer fence around it to keep out the wild turkeys and deer.

At any rate, about the Wildlife Sketching Basics workshop. I taught a similar class (Raptor Sketching) a couple of years ago for the Siskiyou Field Institute, and although the evaluations from the students were good, I wasn't satisfied. I didn't have time to teach them the basics of drawing properly before they were confronted by those imposing birds.

This time I had a full day to prepare them -- and it STILL wasn't enough. I'll show you how it went, then tell you how I think I'll fix it if SFI wants to try again next year.

On Day 1 I did a version of my basic drawing class, but with the sketching exercises oriented to things they might be sketching.

The first thing to do when sketching a living, moving thing is to study it quietly before beginning to sketch. I was actually very pleased with the way they were able to begin to see how to translate what they were viewing onto the paper. Here's one of the first exercises. They only had fifteen minutes to work on this, and they applied themselves to it vigorously. (And no, we didn't draw any frogs the second day!)

Next, I showed them a number of textures which they would find useful for not only wildlife feathers and fur, but many other subjects as well.

One particular goal is to avoid a lot of erasing, which slows you down considerably, and also can frighten away your subject. So, believe it or not, I taught them to sketch with ballpoint pens. The fascinating thing about that is that after the first fright about working in ink, the students quickly become attracted to the way you can get tonal variety and quality from an ordinary ballpoint, and the fact that since you know you will be drawing without erasing, you observe much more carefully and accurately.

Above is the texture exercise, which we did in both pencil and ballpoint with almost identical results. It was an epiphany for several of the students. I think I may have produced a couple more ballpoint converts with this class.

We quit at 2:30, all of us pretty worn out with the intense effort. This workshop was held at the Deer Creek Nature Center near Selma, Oregon, and although it was threatening to rain, I went for a walk along the creek to get some research photos for a trail signage project I'm working on for them. This is the Center, looking east. If you turn around toward the west, you see the huge old trees along the creek, and the mountain rising behind it. The side of that mountain is a tilted, boggy fen, covered with cobra lilies (Darlingtonia) which eat unwary insects. We sketched those in a workshop last September.

I couldn't cross the creek to see them since the water was pretty high, but the creek banks were beautiful, covered in mosses and populated by a gorgeous endemic plant found only a few places in the world. I forgot what I was told it is, but it grows in the water, standing more than two feet tall, and has candy pink pompoms of flowers at the top of thick, hairy stems. Any ideas?

Across the hillside, in dry serpentine soil, Indian paintbrushes of orange, red, and nearly yellow, dotted the stony earth. This is a fascinating environment. But it started to rain, and it poured all night (much to my dismay, thinking of our wildlife sketching scheduled for the next day). The rain made quite a racket on the canvas roof of the Center's yurt, in which three of us were sleeping.

Day 2. With all that deluge, I didn't have high hopes for the next day, but when you're doing a workshop you have to take what comes, rain or shine. We had prepared as much as we could for the possibility of rain, and when we met at Wildlife Images, Cyndee brought an owl, a bald eagle, and a Harlan's hawk (a variety of redtailed hawk) into the nice dry classroom for us to sketch for the morning. I think the students did remarkably well for a first try. Pat's sketch of the Harlan's hawk, here, is really nice.

After our break for lunch, it wasn't raining so we went out to try to sketch cougar, bears and wolves. The grizzly bear fascinated us by clutching a sappy tree and gnawing on it (see the picture) but it all happened too quickly to draw.

The students tried valiantly to sketch, but the animals were NOT pleased with the soggy day and weren't terribly cooperative. And I think the students were a bit overwhelmed, by then. Still, Richard turned out a nice cougar drawing, particularly considering that he had to look through heavy wire fence to see it.

At 2:30, getting sprinkled on and done in, the group headed back to the classroom for close-ups of Nubs the Badger. Nubs is a hoot, reminding me a bit of a furry, low-built tank. I got some quick sketches of him (see below), but without previous experience in sketching moving things, the students weren't able to catch much of this wiggly character. I encouraged the students to take lots of digital photos to work from later, so this turned out to be more a photo session than a sketching exercise.

So here's my thinking on this workshop. While the students gave the course a general thumbs-up, and did learn a lot about drawing, they also suggested that a half-day of wildlife sketching would be plenty. The brain wears out after so much input.

They also suggested that it might be helpful to spend the morning drawing from photos of the animals they would be sketching, just to get features and shapes firmly fixed in their minds and form mental templates of each animal. Then they could draw from the live animals in the afternoon. We had done a bit of hawk template drawing the previous day, but they would like even more.

I'm also thinking that we tried to cover too much ~ and that birds alone would be plenty to challenge the students. That would also mean that we wouldn't have to depend on good weather for the class since we draw the raptors in the classroom. We could hold that workshop any time of the year instead of having to wait for warm outdoor sketching weather. Excellent!

So next time, the class will be called "Raptor Sketching Basics," and I think everyone will be pleased as punch. Me too. I can hardly wait to try again.