Graphite for an Eagle

 I have not produced much in the way of actual art this year, most of my artistic effort in the early months was devoted to re-drawing the images for my geological graphic guide that is discussed in the previous post. This took a lot of energy and time and did not add much in the way of enhancing or advancing the acceptance of the idea. Consequently, I kind of lost momentum and diverted my energies to my other pastimes, like hiking, geology, making little model plastic kits of aircraft, and photography.

I have spent a large amount of time on my photography for the simple reason that photo-opportunities have been a daily occurrence. At some random time of the day, I set out on a four kilometre stroll along the border of our suburb. Border because on the south side are houses and gardens, on the north side lies pine and gum plantation, some open shrub land, and some indigenous forest. The backdrop, no more than a kilometre away, is a mountain range of over a thousand meters elevation. This makes for a good place to see raptors. Most days of the week I see and am able to photograph a variety of Buzzards, some Eagles, and occasionally other types of large predatory birds.

I have not produced anything since the end of 2025. I have now started on another drawing, a Long-Crested Eagle. I have been able to take many photographs of this bird and so have material to work from. My method of working is to capture the outline and salient points of the image on a sheet of A4 paper, then scan this and use Microsoft PowerPoint to expand the outline drawing to the size I require, in this case A3. I then transfer that outline to the final drawing sheet, in this case 200gsm paper and begin the final and hardest part, creating the drawing.

 

At the moment the AI technology is dominating the news and apparently threatens to replace most human workers because of its capabilities. Friends of mine repeatedly ask me for my opinion, “it’s a machine and lacks intelligence”, is my personal view. I will try to briefly explain why I have this opinion and I think art is a particularly good place to start.

My argument begins with a question, in the case of this particular drawing, “why am I producing it”. The actual fabrication process is relatively mechanical; I am copying a photograph. So, I am using a set of pencils, I could use a photographic editing software package, or if the technology was available, request an AI system to produce the image. But the AI system has no more reason to create this drawing than my pencils. The drawing is being created because I want it. Which leaves the question what motivates me to undertake this particular task. And that is my story with this bird.

My story begins with my daily, camera equipped walk. I see an interesting subject and alter my path to obtain a better and closer viewpoint. I see this bird two or three times a week, it is sitting on a tree branch, or a rugby goal post waiting to swoop on rodents which are its prey. It has become accustomed to this human in a sun hat, clutching a device, and peering up at it. So, it watches me warily and at some point, explodes into action and flies across the open area to a more distant perch. In this photograph the bird is actually watching my approach and will then fly. 

  

I have tried to capture and convey that look from the birds left eye in my drawing

 

 

Early in ‘our relationship’ the bird would rise and circle me before making off. But now it ‘slyly’ launches by dropping away from me so that images in flight are harder to obtain, photographs of a perched bird, or a receding bird are easy, try for the launch or in flight approaching the camera. I do have such images and will at some stage convert them to art in some form. 

The point I wish to make here is that the image coveys a feeling that I have of a relationship between myself and a wild animal with a completely alien world-view to our own. At least I think it thinks about what I am up to. And I am trying to portray and communicate that in my drawing. How can an AI machine begin to figure out that a bird in a tree is worthy of being made into an artwork, how can it arrive at all the other ideas behind that notion?  

Below is my final drawing of the bird, I hope you like it.

 

A friend of mine is an ornithologist, his view of my story is a little more grounded. He tells me the eagle probably interprets my behaviour as one of stalking (which it is) with the intent of hunting it for food! He is probably correct but I prefer to think the bird is just a little camera shy and does not want my intrusion into its world.

The end of 2025 and the start of 2026 - New challenge

It has been a while, but I have been active. I have participated in two art exhibitions with two drawings displayed in each. The first exhibition I placed a pair of A3 size drawings of birds of prey. These were based on photographs I have taken in various parts of the country.

The second exhibition arranged by SCAVA ended a few weeks ago. For this latter event I placed a pair of portrait style drawings of rhino. One white or wide lipped, the other black, or hook lipped. Both are endangered species due to the strange belief that eating the horn enhances libido – there is no limit to the stupidity of humans!

These four drawings occupied most of my time though I did also complete three other drawings on this scale, but they are not framed and remain in my ‘archive. Two of them are portraits of a dancer I know through the local camera club. She poses for the club and that is where I obtained images of her.

My final drawing of 2025 was an A3 drawing of my mum 😊 I used a photograph I took of her many years ago as the basis for the drawing.

The new year – 2026 

I am on a sort of ‘roll’ with my drawing but all this work is based on photographs. I have always admired artists who can draw people and scenes ‘out of their head’. Consider all those comic book artists out there creating super-heroes doing dynamic stuff in totally imaginary situations. 

Most arty types I know would say ‘that is not art’ and if pushed admit they could not produce such images anyway! 

It’s a challenge – and my early efforts at figure drawing under Paul Birchall began with his instruction ‘draw a person’, don’t look for a photograph, draw what is in your head. I drew about seventy figures, in various states of disarray and corrected my ‘mental model’ of human proportion and anatomy after review and feedback. 

That was five years ago and where all that material is now is anyone’s guess. I have moved city since then! 

I began this year, 2026, needing a new challenge or direction for my art. I decided that something along the lines of a graphic novel was something I could enjoy. I have been inspired by authors like Marcos Mateu-Mestre who wrote ‘Framed Ink’, as well as Michael Mattesi who wrote ‘Force’. I read these whilst doing curator duty at the art exhibitions. 

Following Paul’s instructions of years ago, I started drawing ‘out of my head’. This did not work too well. So, I hauled out my Andrew Loomis books and used his method to construct a realistic head. That took about one hundred head drawings. I did say it was a challenge – didn’t I?

From heads I moved on to the full figure. This was less traumatic and after two sheets of scrap paper I decided it was time to move on. My efforts several years ago obviously were still with me. It was also by then the end of the month so time to get on with it.

February thus began with the invention and publication of ‘Gina the Geologist’ guiding a party of local hill walkers through the geological aspects of the mountains. 

I developed the story as I went along, each drawing was scanned and placed in MS PowerPoint. There i used the packaged to create word bubbles, type in text, and create frames for each element. Then I copied and pasted the entire panel into a MS Word document. To distribute the material I save the document as a pdf file so that it can be seen as I intend it to look.

The discipline of daily pages

 I am back – well, for now, who knows what the world will bring us!

I am not sure why I stopped producing this blog, it was an interesting exercise and method of reflecting on my art as I progressed. I think I was overwhelmed with activity and could not keep it all up.

At the time I stopped blogging, in an art forum some comment I made in all innocence was responded to with aggression. This gave me pause to re-think why I bother with the internet and a global audience of people so far away I will never actually meet them!

My response to the events outlined above was to join a few local art associations and begin a ‘daily pages’ process. Daily pages, is a process advocated by Julia Cameron in her book ‘The Artist’s Way’. The book progresses into a more spiritual area which did not appeal to me, but the ‘daily pages’ worked for me up to a point.

‘Daily Pages’ involves writing three pages of A4 text to yourself every day. I started getting up at five in the morning and doing just that. I have filled three A4 exercise books with text since then. However, during the latter part of 2024, I thought that perhaps I should write two pages and draw on the third one.

I spent several months producing a small drawing a day, mainly copied from an art book or elsewhere as the mood took me. I started using material from a book by Loomis on figure and faces. For instance, the one above and the one below.

I used other books and material mainly concentrating on the head and figure and over time the style of drawing improved. It was certainly a worthwhile process to follow. The image below was one of the later in the year, practice my not make perfect but it certainly improves the output.

One day I became so caught up in the process that instead of staying within my morning time box, I spent the best part of the day on a drawing of a bird. That image is presented below.

Some of these images were shared on WhatsApp with a local group of artists. The bird drawing was one of them. The lady who organizes that group showed my drawing to a mutual friend and he asked her “what the lines across the page were?”! My response, all via the group on WhatsApp, was that I used an exercise book and those were the lines for writing on. This caused uproar, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was a ‘sin’ to produce art on such paper and I should be using suitably blank sheets for my art. I was duly chastised.

My response to the group of concerned artists was to redraw the image on A3 size art paper. I added a dark background to enhance the three-dimensional effect and that drawing now hangs in a frame on the wall above my desk.

Will this be my last blog post. I don’t know. Since retiring and moving to a small coastal town I have become involved in a camera club, a model building club, a walking club, and assisting a friend open up new walking trails. The latter involves visiting and then describing the geology of the trail. Perhaps in a future blog I will describe the production of a drawing of a Gorgonopsian.

 

Drawing a dinosaur

I recently produced a short description of the geology of a farm located in the mountains north of where I live. The document was used to design a field outing for tourists and for local teenagers to educate them on aspects of the local natural history.

I realized that one way to engage young people is to introduce that magic work, dinosaurs, to the conversation. In reality there are traces of dinosaurs in the area. Certain formations have yielded fossil bones attributed to a number of different species that inhabited the region.

I introduced the dinosaur history in the text of the second edition of my geological guide, but thought that some illustration would to accompany the text would engage the attention of the reader.

One of the fossil animals is a type of dinosaur identified as Ornithomimids. These were animals that resemble modern day large birds such as the ostrich. I began my work by looking in illustrated books at drawings produced by paleo artists to see what these animals were thought to look like. 

Artist impressions of dinosaurs (From: Dixon, 2016, The complete illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures)

 I then found a diagram of the anatomy of dinosaurs that were very similar in stature and overall body form to the Ornithomimid type dinosaurs. In fact, all these images remind me of the modern bird anatomy.

Dinosaur anatomy (From: Witton, 2018, The Palaeoartists handbook)

I tried to create my own unique image without resorting to copying the existing art work of these animals. I like to at least try for some originality, and also challenge myself to create something a little on the edge of my capability. After a few attempts I realized that this was not feasible, my imagination was defeated. So, I resorted to the next best thing, a model.

I drew a top and side view of my imagined animal and used these profiles as the basis to build a small model from scrap paper. Construction began by emulating the main body mass with a pair of box structures, one for the pelvis and one for the rib cage. These were joined by a log strip of paper that served as the backbone or spine. I then glued arms, legs, and a tail onto this box arrangement. Finally, I constructed a third small box to represent the head, this was glued on the end of the spinal paper strip. To stop the head sagging from its relative weight I added a second strip running up vertically across the chest region to raise the head. The whole arrangement is then mounted on a toothpick that can be inserted into a suitable support. In this case another box like form.

Paper model used for creating the drawing

Once I had the paper model to look at it was relatively easy to envisage how the animal would look as it bounded across the landscape. It probably did bound at considerable speed. I think that is the case because they had a very lightweight anatomy, long legs, and very efficient respiratory systems.

Final rough sketch of the dinosaur

Above is the completed sketch. I just created it as an experiment on scrap A4 paper. What remains to be done is the creation of a fine copy of the image for inclusion in the second edition.

The artistic point of this post is to illustrate how one can move from what you imagine to something tangible that can be represented on paper. I suspect the biggest barrier to doing this is the translation of aspects of a form in our imagination into to the coherent image required to convey the idea to others. 

Below is an additional rework of the image shown above, I did this to serve as an illustration in a geology guide I have written about a local farm. 

The image represents a medium sized Theropod Dinosaur that was found locally and named Nqwebasaurus. These animals are suspected of having a feathery coat, but this is debated. I have chosed a middle road and indicated a few salient feathers on the neck and arms. These animals are part of a group called Ornithomimosauria.

Tiger at Ubuntu Wildlife

The Ubuntu Wildlife Sanctuary https://ubuntuwild.com/ is home to large cats that have been rescued from zoological parks and private collections that have become distressed. The animals are too old or disabled to be introduced to the wild and so require care for their remaining life span. Ubuntu provide a suitable facility.

I have been spending some time on the farm providing assistance in the development of educational walking trails. In my visits there is an opportunity to photograph the animals. On my last visit I took a picture of a female tiger.  My picture was taken through a tiger proof fence and was not the most photogenic image of a tiger around. I decided to use the photograph to practice a method called planar portraiture.

A friend of mine, Hilary Adams, bought me a subscription to a Domestika online course in planar portraiture. It was a farewell gift when I left Cape Town. I followed the course and decided to test out some of what I learned to capture the tiger image on paper.

My process started by printing the photograph out on A4 paper and then using a light box to transfer the outline onto a clean A4 sheet (See Fig 1 below). I then drew the various planar lines the define the shape or indicate the relative position of various parts of the anatomy.

Fig 1 - A4 planar structure on image outline

Once I had the image outline, I started to transfer the construction onto an A3 sheet of 60gsm paper (See Fig 2 below). This process is usually quite laborious when using the grid method I have described in the past. I found the planar method comparatively quick by comparison, even though it looks more complicated. In practice the planar approach is not complicated at all, it proved quite intuitive one I had the hang of it. Needless to say, I still made mistakes.  

Fig 2 - Scaling up the image from A4 to A3

Notice in the image above that I use a roller ruler, this allows me to rapidly position a line on the A4 page and transfer it to the A3 page. Just make sure both pages are square to one another. Position the roller rule along the line on the A4 page, roll it off the A4 sheet and remove the sheet, then roll the ruler back to the position you want the line and draw it in.

The other critical activity is scaling to make sure the lines are correctly positioned relative to one another. You can do this with a calculator if you like having to keep on typing numbers into a calculator or computer. You can also do it in your head if you are a mental arithmetic adept! It is also possible to do with proportional dividers, but that requires continual adjustments.

I have found the simplest approach is to use a slide rule…yes, it’s very simple. You set the centre rule to the conversion factor and all the actual conversions are there. You look, aided by the slider to guide your eye, for the distance you measured and next to it is the converted or scaled value.

Measurement is critical in art. I used to try to eyeball my images and it does work up to a point. But one art teacher I had many years ago, Walter Rose, said to me that you need to measure everything and continually check your dimensions and how things align. Needless to say I do not always do this as diligently as I should and the result is that the drawing or image goes awry! In the case of the Tiger drawing shown here, the front foot originally extended a significant distance beyond the nose of the Tiger. I had to do a bit of erasing and redrawing to make it look convincing to the eye.

Once the scaled-up outline is complete on the 60gsm A3 sheet I was ready to add details and shading. I keep my outlines for future use, say to produce a watercolour or oil painting on the same scale. In this case I put the sheet on a light-box and overlaid it with 120gsm paper and traced the outline through. The 120gsm sheet provides a better surface for smudging and toning with graphite. I sometimes use heavier paper and paper with more texture which adds to the visual interest of the image. On a previous post this effect can be seen on the different steam engines I have drawn.

Before, I repeat, before, I start creating the 3D effect on my nice mint 120gsm paper some time is set aside for research. I review from my library of art books animal anatomy and in particular the anatomy of the big cats (See Fig 3 below). For this image I carefully noted how the shoulder blades sit on a cat and where the foreleg bones are in relation to the body.

Fig 3 - Sample pages of big cat anatomy

The reference work that most inspires me is a palaeontology book about the evolution of the big cats. What I like are the pencil illustrations by Mauricio Anton. Mauricio is an artist who sets a standard for reconstruction of long gone species and also a very high standard for pencil illustration. Yes, I am a fan.

Finally, several days are spent doing sessions on the work. I started by producing a light grey toned background. To do this use a pencil sharpener and graphite stick, let the shavings fall on the areas to be toned. The rub the shavings around using a piece of tissue paper. Then lightly start drawing in body structure, muscles and bones that are a prominent part of the form. After that add the landmarks on the image, I use the stripes for this and some of the facial features.

Once the lightly drawn image is complete the next step is to progressively increase the tonal range by making the dark areas darker, and darker, and darker. All the time leaving mid toned areas alone once they are dark enough! Areas that need highlights can be created by careful application of the putty-rubber. Highlights were restricted to the spinal area and parts of the legs.

I also used tonal range to bring the nearside and foreground towards the viewer. To do this I make sure the tonal range of these elements is wide, and the more distant parts, for instance the far side legs, are depicted in a tighter range of tones. The result can be seen below (See Fig 4 below).

Fig 4 - Final drawing of Ubuntu Tiger