Museum Studies (2010)
Hunter and clean-up crew
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I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’ve used Canson Mi-Teintes paper a lot, starting in Jr. High school actually. I’ve used it for drawings, preliminary studies for illustrations, and even glued to masonite for painting. However, I stopped using that method some years back now. Regardless, over time I accumulated odds and ends, which I trimmed down into mostly ~6x8” sheets, and these were my primary paper for doing these studies at the American Museum of Natural History, in NYC. It’s a good size, and insured I wouldn’t be there all day working on one thing.
As I was running out of these extras, I picked up a pad of Canson sheets, in multiple colors, all of which were ones I’d use anyway. Canson comes in two textures, depending on the side of the sheet--smoother and orange-peel. Since 8th grade, whenever I’ve used Canson, I used the smoother side, which still has a nice tooth. The orange-peel side was way too textured, it seemed, to do any detailed work on. So imagine my surprise when the Canson pad had the orange-peel side face-up in the pad. It seems that’s the side they think I should be working on! Needless to say, I took to tearing pages off and drawing on what I now know is the, “Back side.”
I usually carried a selection of papers with me, and a pencil case full of drawing tools. As I considered what I was about to draw, I’d pull out the paper and tools I felt were appropriate for capturing whatever it was. Since I was working on toned paper some of the time, vs. always white (which I used in my Figure Drawing in that era), I included pastel pencils in my kit. I was using Faber-Castell’s Pitt Pastel line, which come in a full palette range and can hold a point decently well. They’re smudgeable, but not so much that you are afraid to breathe on them.
The Andean Condor is massive, its wingspan could easily have warranted a page thrice the width. My main purpose for drawing it, however, was to practice the wing portion pictured here, in preparation for an illustration. For things which I want to study in more detail, I still often default to pencil, since it has the finest point of my dry media and is still the thing I’m most accustomed to, having used it since before kindergarten.