#171 The Otter

Animalia: Day 120

The Otter

Silverpoint on terraskin, again. 

(I tried to capture some Tracy Morgan-ness in the otter at top left.)

And then traced and colored digitally.

Tomorrow (probably actually!): the Oviraptor.

#170 The Ostrich

Animalia: Day 119

The Ostrich

Preliminary doodle.

I did the sketches on the left first, then wanted to exaggerate the

small head, so I did the thumbnail sketch at the bottom.

Then I tried to blow that up, which was not entirely successful.

So then I photoshopped it to be roughly the proportions I wanted.

I tried coloring too, but it was a mess, so you get the grayscale (er, silver).

I am in Paris right now in residency at the Cité Internationale Des Arts,

making drawings and what not, but more on that in another post.

I did these animal drawings a few months ago, but they are silverpoints,

which are apparently difficult to document. 

My scanner blew out the images, and photographing them yielded 

mixed results, but that is what I ended up using.

Anyways, silverpoint on Terraskin, which is paper made from stone.

Tomorrow (maybe actually?!): the Otter.

#166 Silverpoint / Copperpoint

For a while now, I have been meaning to 

undertake some metalpoint drawings.

To this end I procured some copper wire from 

Home Depot, and some silver soldering wire from William Binnie.

Today, I visited the paper conservator at the National Gallery of Art

to talk about silverpoint, and she showed me a number of supports.

She then offered a few sheets of different prepared grounds to try out.

With these in hand, I then fashioned some electrical-taped tools

of which any prison-shank-aficionado would be proud.

The result:

Godzilla VS King Ghidorah (after Frans Post)

Here is Frans Post's original painting.

Vertical and Horizontal lines delineate different ground preparation.

The ground is bone ash and rabbit skin glue.

The right side of the page was dampened and rubbed with cheese cloth.

The middle horizontal third was burnished, and the

bottom third was sanded with pumice stone.

The dampening didn't seem to affect the surface too much,

but I found the burnished was easiest to work with.

The sky, background, and Godzilla are silverpoint.

The foreground and King Ghidorah are copperpoint.

When I was working, there was no visible difference in color

between the two, so I am interested to see how they age.

And here are the tools: