brianvds

I visited the botanical gardens in Pretoria today, for a picnic with friends. I wonder why I don't go there more often. The place is quite delightful, and filled with enough sketchable plants to last one for years. As it turned out I was lazy, because there are very few soporifics quite as effective as a mellow winter afternoon in Pretoria. But I did get around to making two small sketches in an A6-sized sketchbook, and also made time to take a few photos until the camera's battery gave up the ghost.

Here's a type of aloe:



Quite a number of species of these spiny succulents can be found in southern Africa, and they range in size from about 30 cm tall such as the one I sketched, to sizable trees.

And then a quick sketch of a smallish Strelitzia:



Larger specimens are also common in the garden, and I took a close-up of one of their quite exotic-looking flowers:



Here's a type of Euphorbia:



The genus Euphorbia is quite large and the plants range from small herbs, to medium-sized trees such as the above one, to quite large trees. Just about all of them contain a milky latex, and in the case of these tree-sized ones, colloquially known as candelabra trees, the latex is a quite potent skin irritant that will make you break out in red welts. It has traditionally been used as a fish poison (poured into rivers or dams, it stupefies the fish so that they can be caught by hand) and also to kill maggots in open wounds on livestock. So these trees are not to be trifled with. When I was in primary school I once went on a school camping trip, and when we arrived at the camp, a bunch of kids from another school were just leaving. One of them looked like he had had an altercation with a blowtorch. Well, it was one of those junior paramilitary type camps; in those days they were more or less compulsory. I have no idea what the situation is nowadays. Anyway, one of the things you were supposed to do was to learn how to camouflage yourself. The standard way is to simply smear your face with mud. But this poor city kid got creative and made a paste of soil and Euphorbia latex for his facial camouflage assignment. Some things you only do once.

Last but not least, the dry fruit of a wild teak (Pterocarpus angolensis), found in the warmer areas of the country. This time of year the trees are quite attractive, covered with these large pods. On my screen it shows up about actual size; two match boxes would just about cover it.



The wood of the wild teak is of high quality and can be used to make furniture.

That's it. Next time I'll take new batteries for the camera, and a bigger sketchbook.

As I mentioned before: I simply can't bring myself to create any 'finished' drawings. They all end up looking terribly cramped and tentative. Quick sketches seem to be more fun, and however amateurish they might look, I seem to nevertheless have more success with them than with attempts at something more professional looking.

This one was very roughly copied in pen and ink with watercolour, from some or other 19th century oil painting by an artist whose name I forgot to make a note of, so now I have no idea whom to credit for the original. Hint to web masters: make the artist's name part of the file name.

Anyway, the original, typical of works from the era, is a marvel of rich, subtle colour and light, quite unlike my rather modernist version, which looks like it belongs on a greeting card. Which is in fact exactly what I turned it into by gluing it to a piece of card. I'll be the death of Hallmark's yet.

Warning: this post contains several links to other pages. These are supposed to open in a new window. But my knowledge of the HTML code necessary to achieve that is about a decade out of date, so I don't know whether it is going to work in all browsers, or indeed in any. My apologies in advance to any frustrated surfers out there, desperate to follow links to nowhere, if any.

A few of my latest adventures in dubious creativity; two small pen drawings with watercolour, and a pencil sketch. None of them are larger than about 15cm in height, which is partly why they lack in much detail. The other reason is that I am too lazy to try to put in all the detail, and that when I do try to do so, I tend to end up with extremely messy pictures anyway.

Here's some or other species of butterfly. I made the wings a bit too large but only noticed it when I had already reached the point of no return with the picture:



And then, a type of insect known as a stainer bug. I'm told these can be nasty pests, but seeing as I'm not a farmer, I think they're quite beautiful:



And lastly, another in my series of credit card-sized portraits. I didn't like it very much, but then, I seldom like anything I draw very much. At least Missus Moneypenny liked it. No, not THAT Moneypenny, this one.
She now proudly displays it in her living room for all the world to see (and she knows LOTS of people), which is one reason why I'm glad I didn't sign it with my full name.

Anyway, here it is:



Something rather weird and wonderful has happened, or so I thought. I host my images at Photobucket and one of their features that I recently discovered is that you can look at some statistics of how often your images have been accessed. This includes information on which sites they have been accessed from. And so I discovered that my portrait of Mr. Bean from a previous post had been accessed on a site called Portal of Evil. I had never heard of them before.

My first thought was that someone had enjoyed my portrait so much that he/she had stolen it for his own site, and while many other people might immediately think of calling their lawyers, I simply felt rather proud of myself. I have grave doubts over much of current copyright law, and being happy to put my proverbial money where my mouth is, as far as I am concerned, anyone is welcome to use anything he finds on my blog for any purpose whatsoever. Especially seeing as I used someone else's photo as reference for the drawing in the first place.

But alas, as it turns out I was not about to achieve sudden fame in cyberspace. It was on a page where people post images randomly pulled from Livejournal, so my little portrait languishes there amongst a whole host of other images. You can see it on this page.

Every now and then I get in the mood to work in miniature, or at least rather small, and I think credit card-size is just about perfect for miniatures, so in a quiet half hour at work some days ago, I traced the outline of a card on a piece of paper, and made a sketch of that famous maniac Mr. Bean. Well, actually I don't have a credit card, but as far as I know an ATM card is the same size. The original is about 8.5cm X 5.5cm in size, and on my screen it shows up actual size, but I guess your results may vary.



And here's Harry Potter (about 10cm in height), or is it a teenaged John Lennon?



And lastly, getting a bit too large to quite call it a miniature, a sketch of a lily (12cm high):

I keep on forgetting to post these images, but here they are, finally. I took these photos of a summer storm early in January. The sun was setting, and was visible through curtains of rain, while above, the clouds boiled. It created a quite unearthly spectacle, and these photos do not even begin to capture the full impact, or the amazing range of colours. It has been a while since I have seen everything from deep blues to greens to acidic yellows and oranges in the same sky.







Unfortunately the rather cheap and unsophisticated point-and-shoot camera couldn't quite capture the very wide range of lights and darks, so some areas ended up overexposed and others too dark.

After my previous post, I suppose this was sort of inevitable...



Not really a very good likeness. I didn't have much time, and then I committed my old sin of stretching out the face too long. So I had to erase and redraw most of the lower half of the face, after which the neck was too long, and there wasn't time to fix it. Now will this be the last murderer for the moment, or have I started a series?

...I'm having an old friend for dinner.




This sketch is in keeping with my new philosophy of not drawing. I can't draw. Never could. Probably never will be able to either. All I can do is make rough sketches.

But what is this thing with drawing, er, sketching, psychopathic murderers? Who'll be next? Jeffrey Dahmer!?

A very quick portrait sketch of one Najwa Petersen, who recently achieved notoriety after being convicted of murdering her husband Taliep, a musician. I have no particular preference for drawing murderers; I just happened to have a press photograph of the lady at hand to serve as reference. I was at work at the time, and only had a few minutes, so I rapidly scribbled my sketch within no more than twenty minutes or so, hence the rather unpolished look (I also did not have an eraser on hand, so I made no corrections). There are many inaccuracies, but I think I sort of managed to capture a likeness.

And this confirmed something I have suspected for some time: I seem to be constitutionally incapable of really refined drawings. I either capture a likeness within twenty minutes, or not at all. If I had spent hours and hours on this drawing, it might have looked more refined, but almost certainly would have been less recognizable as the widow Petersen.

I decided to play around with oil paints again, after having given it a rest for several months. And this time, I used a 'real' support too, namely Masonite, primed with a layer of acrylic. It was a bit different, in some ways more difficult, to work on than the cardboard I used before. But it does seem to give a more slick sort of look.

Well, thus far I have passionately hated every painting I have done, and this one is no exception. But if I paint a hundred more, who knows what they might begin to look like? I suppose we'll see...

An inflorescence of an Agapanthus. When the flowers open, they look a bit like miniature lilies.

Ballpoint pen with coloured pencil.