'95 B4

I have had a couple notions about pieces to do that involve my old truck.  This is the first full scale one I have done.  The weather has been almost perfect- better than any Kansas August that I can recall.  Days starting in the 50's & 60's and ending below the mid 80's -sometimes down in the lower 70's.  Wow.  I picked this truck up to replace a '94 that was nearly dragging on the street.  A tremendous upgrade considering it had both a/c and an automatic tranny.  Power steering and power windows were also an upgrade.  Anywho, it was very nice to sit out with the mosquitoes in the perfectly still weather and do some sketching without even leaving home...  If there were only a little breeze it would'a held the little buuggers at bay, but alas...  Even now as I write this sitting on the front porch, the DEET I put on earlier is not stopping the villains from attacking my elbows and hands. (Sorry about the rant!) The truck has served me well; and I needn't worry about someone driving off with my subject as sometimes happens. I just backed the pick up down the driveway to the street, cocked the wheels, and was ready to go.  Done in a mostly used up pad of Strathmore sketch 60 lb, 11" x 14" paper.  It always amazes me just how much I learn when drawing. I always see something I did not notice before. It is crazy what a minuscule little chunk of graphite can do to a piece of paper. (Just doused my arms again with "Off", and now the mosquitoes are attacking my ears!  But I refuse to go in!)
Here below is a detail of the center of the drawing.

South wetlands.

 The date was the 4th of July as the note on the side indicates.  I headed down the new Haskell Ave. just before it opened.  Took the old road back west that leads through the wetlands. Just as I was getting on the dirt road off Haskell I met a fella as old as I who had just come through the way I was considering going. He on his bicycle and I on mine. Never having been that way before, I was glad to get a little direction from him.  After a wander down through some beautiful country I had not been in before - mostly grass and dirt trails- I came upon the new road replacing Louisiana through the wetlands.  This is the painting that resulted from the sketch I did while sitting on the bike. While sketching I was watching as a small group of grown kids came out to the bridge from father south and were doing some fireworks.
   
Below is a detail of the painting.

clear harbor

          This is about the only drawing I did while actually in Three Hills.  The Super 8 motel actually sits where a farm sat 50 years ago. The motel is a happening place. There are always people in there. From bikers on a weekend explore, to Hutterites arranging rides around the country. It happened to be a long weekend and the motel was crawling with families and kids- some were going to the Dinosaur museum in Drumheller. That is some 25 miles to the south, in Alberta desert country.   This was early one morning.  I took a walk out around the parking lot, and this is what I found. Some truck driver found an overnight harbor for his rig, in the parking lot at the motel. There are no real harbors close, but I am sure there are reclamation projects to be done. Or maybe this was headed to the west coast, one Province away.  The pine trees in this part of Alberta have a different feel than the cedar trees of Kansas. The prairie is rolling and yellow green from the maturing canola, mixed with wheat and barley fields in a latitude where they get enough rain to need little if any irrigation.   I do not remember seeing barley fields since helping with harvest in south west Nebraska in the early 1960's.
          This vacuum tank sitting on this lowboy looks like it is made for sucking up polluted sea water.  What you do with it after that, I have no idea.  I made a note of one of the warning signs posted on the back that warns operators or maintenance people of one of the dangers working on this piece of equipment.  You can also see a sketchy reproduction of the logo that was on the door of the semi tractor with the waves below and the sea gull above.
          This is a lot of jabbering for a small sketch!

face time

Needless to say this sketch brought some chuckles from the folk sitting next to us.  Nice thing when someone is phone channeling-  they have no idea what is going on around them!  This guy plopped in a seat as the terminal was beginning to fill with passengers for 3 different flights.  He seemed unwilling to shift his pose, let alone walk about some.  So I could sketch on; and so I did.  I guess it is nice to have a ledge on which to rest your phone so the fingers are the only thing working. Well, hopefully the brain too!
One lady sat down to see what I was up to. She was returning home after helping her daughter with a new baby.  One kid who has been working in Tuscon for a year was headed to Calgary- arriving at 10:10 pm - and then renting a car for an 8 hour drive into Saskatchewan for a wedding. The drive included a little sleep at his folks house, plus a detour to pick up a friend.  We were glad we had a room reserved near the Calgary airport.
I was surprised at how simple it was to find places and people to sketch in an airport terminal. Cannot say I have ever tried it before. Usually at home it is a bit more disconcerting to find a place where I am comfortable sketching people - or where I think they are ok with someone sketching them.  One nice thing about the airport terminal is that there is such a variety of people, and most are "in their own world" paying little attention to anyone else.

Skychefs

       

            These common views of a plane nosed into the terminal with the crews buzzing around both sides and the boarding ramp snuggled up to the side turned out to be not as common as I thought. This view with the mountains behind was about my only chance for such a sketch.  There were no views like this on our 2 hour wait to board in Calgary.  We were jammed into a terminal half its normal size due to construction, and for some reason they also had the windows screened off about 6 or 7' up so no one could see out.  Though I had some time to sketch, there would be none of the planes prepping for their next flight.  So I had to settle for sketching fellow passengers, and at very close range. They sometimes give you dirty looks when they realize you are committing them to paper- especially when they see how uncomplimentary the sketches are.          
           As far as the subject of this drawing is concerned, it is interesting just how much can be jammed in around the plane.  The airline's goal is to make up for a late arrival by squeezing the cleanup and re stocking into as short a time as possible.  They have to unload all the checked bags and reload a whole new set as well.

heavy lunch

     
           We have spent the last week and a half recovering from a hectic end of July and beginning of August.  By the time of this sketch we were waiting for a connecting flight in Minneapolis when this pilot showed up with his dinner.  I would suppose him to be on a tight schedule perhaps.  You can see the wrap around his burrito or whatever with his jowls drooling in it. You can also see his black Captain's cap stuffed between the bars on his luggage.  No, I did not do him justice in the weight department.  I cannot ever remember seeing a pilot this chubby- not that I fly enough to know if there are some.  But I couldn't resist stretching the girth just a little. Seems like a perfect definition of the phrase, "feeding your face".                      
           I had taken along a 5" x 9" Strathmore 60 lb pad of 100 sheets which gave me ample space for sketching on the way north without being too cumbersome in the backpack.  This is actually one of the last full sketches I did before the trip ended.

"skiff a snow"

          It has been over two weeks since anything has been posted here; but I have an excuse or two: one week at Ozark Family Camp (as we have done for 36 years) and part of this week at a High School reunion 1500 miles from home.                                                                                                 Just in case you are dreaming of some cooler weather, maybe this drawing will help.  It was done from the living room window on a chilly February day about noon, if you can tell by the shadows. There had been just a "skiff" of snow as Gramma Ruth would say.  When the neighbors backed out they left these trails of dark crossing the shadows. It was one of those irresistible scenes that just gotta be put to paper. For some reason or other the simple pencil drawing reproduced pretty well...   Don't always have that good fortune.   5" x 9" format.