Drawing Tuesday - "animal magic" or Brunei Gallery

 For those not meeting at Brunei Gallery, the suggested topic is "animal magic". Used to be a tv show of that title, anyone remember it? Here's a classic installment from 1967 -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds_zoOD_8FE&ab_channel=treffynnon19

Anything to do with animals is grist for the mill this week!

From Ann - A magical cat called Casper....still miss him after 5 years.

From Carol - I went to the Brunei and really enjoyed just working in ink for a change. This is ‘The world inside the mountain’ by Dong Jinsheng. 3 crows included (does that pass as animal magic).

From Jo - This is a ceramic animal (deer?), decorated to look like stitched fabric and - this is the magic - if you pull its red, felt tongue you get a self-retracting tape measure! It has FOREIGN stamped on its bottom and is fairly hideous, but I couldn't resist it in some long-forgotten charity shop. Its about 4 inches high.

From Janet K - Inuit sculpture drawn at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art a few years ago.  Spirit carrying a fish by Nick Sikkuark. Bone, fur, antler. Made about 2000.

From Joyce - Here are two Wood ducks and a Mandarin duck at Kelsey Park,  from a photo I took a few weeks ago.

From Judith - Inspired by woodcut ‘Morning Mist’ at Brunei Gallery exhibition of modern Chinese woodblock prints.

From Najlaa -  I just finished this fabric owl panel with wadding and machine stitch.

From Richard - For some reason I'm reluctant to draw from photo's but it seemed the best option this time. We have a low-pitched lean-to shed with a corrugated panel roof. It has become a green roof almost entirely without interference. Three weeks ago we found a fox asleep on it.

From Sue K - l love the starling murmurations - l used a freeze frame found on the internet as reference. 

From me - "The guys" live on the top shelf of Freya's kitchen (that her daddy made for her). The changing population includes bears, rabbits, pigs, dolls (handmade by grannies), and at the bottom of the crowded heap, an emu.

Dragon du jour

On finding a shirt with dragons printed on it - which came from a charity shop aeons ago - I decided to make a stuffed toy for the Grandbaby, with tabs for possible holding on to (when she gets to the holding-on stage) but in the meantime solely for my own gratification. I haven't actually made much for this child - no blankets or quilts, no knitted or sewn garments - goodness why, she has other grandmothers who like doing that!

And she has a slew of toys. Already.

But here is The Dragon as printed and as cut out with trial tabs -

 A little revision was needed. The tag on the tail is one of my "Travel Lines London" tags, used for the travel-lines tote bags and tool rolls, two projects currently in abeyance. (But not entirely moribund!)

The revised version has all the tabs in sensible places, and has been stuffed -

And finally - a line of a sort of blanket stitch strengthens the inner curves, and the eyes have been defined by dense stitching -

In fact the second eye was added with stitch. He (she??) looks very gung-ho! Hmm, Gung Ho is quite a good name for a dragon, if a name is ever needed for this one.

What day is it today?

Greetings from my menagerie -

Drawing Tuesday - Natural History Museum

From the gallery of the Mammals room in the Blue Zone of the Natural History Museum, you can clearly see the dust on the Right Whale skeleton.  I drew the front view twice: with grainy coloured pencil, and chunky graphite stick - both watersoluble, but I didn't try out the waterbrush ...

On to the side view - I was curious about those floating bones -

The heart-shaped bone is the breastbone (sternum), but the others? One day I'll find out ... it's fascinating that whales developed from a land mammal, some 50 million years ago, and still have vestigial leg bones. 

The "nose" - an extension of the skull - is called the rostrum, and the baleen plates go into the cavity above the lower jaw.

HB pencil; coffee wash added later

Apologies for the strange lighting effects on some of the next pix - cafe tables with dim light or spotlights are not ideal for photography.

Janet K captured birds -

 Carol zoomed in on architectural details -

 Judith found lovely feathers on the Victoria Crowned Pigeon -

 Joyce was among the colourful minerals -

 Janet B found an unlikely pairing in the Mammals room -

 Mags was looking for pleiosaurs -

 Extracurricularly ... Janet B had been drawing in a faraway museum last week -

 ... this led to "homework" - draw "a creature" - from life or from a museum or from a photograph.

Mags had been up north on a retreat, developing surreal collage and mark-making in piano-hinge books, among other activities ...

Drawing at Royal Veterinary College

The Royal Veterinary College (in Camden) is running some evening sessions for drawing its specimens. I had been to a session in August, and drew the elephant skeleton that graces the cafe atrium -

The college's facebook page has a gallery of images from the drawing sessions. I used a felt pen in an A5-sized book, quite a challenge for capturing the elephant. Have you heard that elephants have four kneecaps? Actually the front "knees" are elbows...

But to the present: it was birds' beaks that caught my eye -

Magellanic penguins

Egret, curlew, and ... hmm, don't know ...

This is Bubo bubo, the Eurasian eagle owl

There's something amazing about those eye sockets...

A smaller owl, also with scleral bones round the eye

The specimen of choice was removed from the case and we could (carefully) handle it. I turned Bubo bubo this way and that (ignoring the tiger skull behind him) for a page of blind drawings, discovering his bony secrets, with a view to reading about it later - owls' eyes are fascinating - and did you know there are 216 species of owl, 18 of which are of the barn owl family? (the others are "typical owls", Strigidae family) -

Some rear views, including a closer look at the vertebrae -

I wasn't the only one to choose an owl skeleton  -

 A few more photos from this fascinating place -

Teaching materials

Hen in a cage?

 And this is Lucy, our australopithicine relative -

She's the size of a child, and children are apparently fascinated by her when similar models are taken round to schools - they can look her right in the eye. And she's ever so old ... 3.2 million, how many birthdays is that?

Some ceramic horses from China

Whinnying horse, Tang dynasty, 618-907 (via)

Eastern Han dynasty, 25-220 (via)

Han dynasty, 206BC - 220AD (via)

Tri-colour glaze; possibly a replica (via)

"Ancient" (via)

From the tomb of An Pu, Tang dynasty (via)

Polo player, Tang dynasty (via)

Dogs in quilts

The other day at the National Gallery we were noticing the various dogs in the paintings - and sure enough, in the bookshop was a big fat book about dogs in art! (And it's not the only one of its kind...) Then this pooch romped into my inbox -

"Mendelssohn" by Franki Kohler

so I went looking for some other dogs in quilts. First, some portraits, then some abstracts and/or some patterns...

This is Sammy (via this blog)-

This block pattern can be customised to your dog or your friend's dog -

Two pets remembered - and many more dog quilts here -

From the colour distribution, this could be a heat-seeking dog ... I like the idea ... (from here) -

Strangely little is required to make individual personalities (from here) -

How to piece a bassett hound? now he needs ears (via) -

Scotties are probably the cutsie dog par excellence for quilt patterns -

Getting much more abstract, here's another pattern -

And another abstract rendition (from here) -

I had honestly forgotten that I contributed to this plethora of pooches with "Yappy Dog", made for the Little Gems raffle in 2008 -

So, enough already! Besotted dog-lovers might want to visit this pinterest board, which has some excellent portraits.