Giraffes

I have been drawing giraffes for a long time. These are from my 1997 sketchbook and were done at the Cologne Zoo in Germany.


This is from 1999 and it was the first time I felt good about the results of anything I'd painted in watercolor. I've heard people say that you have to use 100 sheets of paper before you get one good watercolor. I don't know if I believe it - I don't know if I want to...


I tried colored pencils for awhile. I liked the results I saw other people getting, and I've always felt more comfortable drawing than painting. Paint covers surfaces quickly and with a lot of saturation, though, so I didn't stay with colored pencils. This baby giraffe is from 2005.


I've also tried pastels. I taped paper to the living room wall to do a bigger pastel drawing. I used sticks of pastel here, because they cover more surface faster than pastel pencils do. The pastel dust makes a fantastic mess as it falls to the floor. There was just no getting the carpet under this painting clean.

I used a photo to draw the last pastel.


I know one of the giraffe keepers in Nuremberg, Germany. She let me come to the night holding and I got to feed the giraffes. They like Wasa bread.

Elephant Parade

When I started sketching in zoos in the mid 90s I drew as accurately as I could - I wanted realistic results. Here's a sketchbook page from the Cologne Zoo in Germany in the summer of 1997.


And I would do very realistic finished work. This is a pastel from 2008.You can tell it's a zoo elephant from the tusks - they're short to protect the other elephants and their handlers.


At the beginning of 2010 I started painting with acrylic. And instead of drawing every eyelash (a friend once commented on seeing too much hyper-realistic art that drew every detail) I painted very abstractly. It affected my sketching and what I wanted the results to be. I went to the zoo for days in a row in the summer of 2010 to draw the elephants. I have pages and pages in my sketchbook that look like this:



Gesture after gesture - I started a new drawing each time the elephant moved. It felt funny to be drawing so loosely - and I didn't feel as comfortable having other zoo visitors look over my shoulder.
For the first time I used my sketches instead of photos to do finished artwork. I did several wall sized acrylic paintings from these summer sketches.

Goats!

Goats are so funny. They always look like they're deciding which article of your clothing they'll eat first as you walk towards them. I drew lots of goats in zoos in the late 90s. This is from my sketchbook and it's a little light because I used pencil - maybe HB or B. I didn't trust myself with 2B or softer until just a few years ago.
In 2005 Muenster Zoo in Germany opened a children's area and I had the chance to do some illustrations for the signage. I did my drawings in pencil and used Photoshop to give them different colors in the signage.


This final drawing is pen and ink painted with watercolor.

Gorilla Fritz

In 2007 I was at the Nuremberg Zoo in Germany. This is me with Fritz. He's their silverback.(He has an outdoor space, too.)
It's hard to draw animals - they never stay still. Even when they're sleeping they don't hold a pose for longer than a minute. I start lots of different gesture sketches and if I wait long enough eventually the animal will cycle back through to the same pose and I can keep drawing.

These are pages from my sketch book. I used pigma Micron pens and sketched the gorillas at the Toledo Zoo in 2008. At the time I used sketching as a way to understand animal anatomy, but when I did a finished drawing I worked from photos.

This is Fritz - from a photo - drawn in pencil on 140 lb. hot pressed watercolor paper.