Return to OZ

I don't get over to the Oakland Zoo as often, but I have a couple of trips' worth of drawings saved up from there as well.

August 3, 2016: A nice day out with fellow artists Ben Jelter and Alexa Dunham! The baboons put on a great show for us.

 

 

  

February 22, 2017: Finally, a break in the rainy weather! I needed to practice camels, I wanted to draw elephants in memory of Judi Reynolds, and I did some tigers since I'd been discussing them with George Cwirko Godycki. But if I had my druthers, I'd be happy to draw hyenas all day long...

 

SF Zoo: The Mega Catchup Part 1

I have almost nine months' worth of San Francisco Zoo drawings that I never got around to posting here. I think I'd better break this up into a couple of installments...

June 16, 2016: I'd been pretty busy with my teaching courseload and a big pile of freelance work, but there was a baby anteater to admire!

 

July 29, 2016: For Global Tiger Day I learned how to tell tigers apart, said hello to Boone the rhino, and checked in on the anteater family.

July 30, 2016: March of the Penguins! Two chicks returned from Fish School to rejoin the penguin commune, and people lined up eagerly along the parade route for photo ops.

I chatted with a couple of very knowledgeable volunteers about the fine points of penguin anatomy, and there was a penguin-suited mascot to entertain the kids.

Inti the bobcat gave me a good drawing availability, and I witnessed the new spectacle of a peccary mudbath.

 

According to keeper Sandy Huang, Leanne the tiger is the loveliest animal in the world, but Kachina is the most adorable.

Oakland Museum of California, 02/26/2017

Every month, John Muir Laws organizes a sketching field trip for the SF Bay Area's Nature Journal Club. This time, thanks to an errant weather forecast, he ended up moving it indoors and we checked out the recently renovated Galley of California Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California. Dioramas galore!

First we had to run the gantlet of admission. It happened to be the final day of the museum's "Black Panthers at 50" exhibit, and the crowd was immense!

And then, the exhibits. The gallery is organized into seven different California regions, and I attempted to document them all! No color media are permitted in the gallery, so welcome to my monochrome wonderland.

No Ban No Wall Rally, 02/04/2017

As usual, I have a ton of art stuff to catch up on posting here. Just for variety, I'll go backwards from the most recent batch. Here are some sketches from the recent "No Ban No Wall" rally in San Francisco's Civic Center plaza...

 Warming up with Laurie and friends before the rally. This is how us sketchers limber up!

Some scene-setting crowd shots. The giant lanterns are an installation by Hong Kong artist Freeman Lau for Chinese New Year.

Getting a bit more up close and personal as the rally winds up. I think these kinds of rallies aren't as lively as marches, because you're basically just standing around listening to people speechify, but it's always interesting to observe the mix of attendees and their homemade signs.

The Witching Hour

One more for this batch: My haul from the Academy of Art's twice-annual Costume Carnival. This was the last one masterminded by the Illustration department's amazing model coordinator Sarafina, so it was kind of a special occasion.

An introductory warmup. These are all on 25x30 Post-It Note sheets, incidentally.

Bringing in some watercolor. The acrylic paint pens I was using for the background took some fussing to get everything nicely blended.

In hindsight, I need to pay more attention to arm proportions on these big drawings. Turns out it's hard to get everything sized properly when you can't see the whole figure at once!

And the end! A lot of the other artists at the event ended up as damned guest sinners in this one.

Safari West

And I forgot to post these! The lovely folks at Safari West invited me to come and draw their animals to create some artwork for their fall fundraiser auctions.

A set of ink drawings on illustration board, awaiting the addition of colors.

De Brazza's monkeys...

Sable antelopes...

Cheetahs and a striped hyena...

And beautiful white rhinos.

The finished and framed drawings, ready to ship out.

Stow Lake Perspectives

As usual, when I get busy, I fall behind on updating this art blog. Let's start catching up with some location drawings from Stow Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, one of my favorite nearby nature haunts. I drew these as perspective examples for a guest class I recently taught for the wonderful John Muir Laws.