Br'er Fox and other musings

I am old enough to remember Walt Disney's Song of the South, a short animated movie that told some of the tales of Uncle Remus, the Tar Baby story being the primary one. The hero of those stories is Br'er Rabbit, but the villain of the piece is often Br'er Fox or Br'er Bear. I suppose the stories are no longer considered politically correct, as they are a white man's retelling of old Slave stories. Joe Chandler Harris wrote the stories in dialect to approximate how they would have been spoken by an old black ex-slave. Is the dialect accurate, probably not, between that and the mere fact that a white man was doing the writing will offend some now. It is too bad, the stories are wonderful, or at least I think they are. My memory of them doesn't include any racial slurs as such, unlike Thorton Burgess's tales. I used to own a couple of Burgess's books and was appalled to find mixed in with one of the stories about nature what I would call a racial slur. He of course was only reflecting the attitudes of the time (1874 - 1965).  Since otherwise he wrote some wonder stories about nature it is too bad, On the Green Meadows was my favorite.

Anyway the fox in the above drawing reminded me of Uncle Remus and the stories of the fox and the rabbit. Course my fox is chasing a mouse and not a rabbit, but just drawing a fox brought those other stories to mind. I am rather pleased with my active friend who is modeled after a real fox not one of the classic illustrations. I have already finished a rabbit, so now I need to finish off the bear and I will have three of the animals in the stories illustrated.

Below is my figure drawing from last evening:

I find this a much more successful drawing than I have done the past couple of weeks. Not sure where my mojo had run off too, but it wasn't working on Monday nights. Last weeks drawing particularly has bothered me. Scott has suggested that I might want to redraw the pose in my sketchbook even just as thumbnails to see if I can work out where I went wrong with it.

I think it is one of those drawings where even if you draw everything correctly it doesn't look right because the brain is looking for a subtle distortion that really isn't there. Hmm, I don't think I have phrased that understandably. The brain is as much a part of "seeing" the real world as the eyes are, when you look at something the brain interprets it for you. This factor is one reason why it is difficult to draw from photographs, when you look at a scene live the brain automatically ignores a lot of the details which show up in a photograph and can be distracting. Sorry I digress a bit, but I think something similar happens when viewing some poses. In real life the brain interprets what it sees a certain way, but putting the pose on paper even if it is really accurate is not the way the brain "sees" it. That discrepancy makes the drawing look off. Ingres was known for distorting his figures in subtle ways that the viewer doesn't notice and makes them come alive. One of my goals is to learn to do the same.

That is it for today. Per usual comments are always welcome.

Nature Drawing #4

I meant to do this update yesterday, but with one thing and another I hadn't gotten the next exercise for my Nature Drawing finished. So I drew it last night. The subject is one of my house plants, a relatively small Jade plant that I started from a cutting last year. The exercise that I was supposed to be doing was the plant study drawing, but I think I will consider it as the studies for the next two exercises also, proportion and shape, and foreshortening as I had to do both with this plant. I did one detail sketch, a gesture drawing, and one that is more or less from memory.

Jade plant detail

The gesture drawing is on the left, and the memory drawing on the right

I may not have gotten to the book exercise until Sunday, but I have been doing other sketches. To continue with some animal studies I was working last week from chipmunk photo's. You can see an example of what I was doing below, one page out of the couple I did.

What was keeping me away from the drawing pad was trying to do some clean up/de-cluttering around my apartment. Like many I have way too much stuff. Toward the end of last week I decided that it was time to try and get all my beading supplies put away. I haven't been beading since last summer so really there was no reason for them to be out and about cluttering up my living space. There were also some magazines that it was time to go through, glean what I though would be useful in the future and then get out of the apt. In doing this I found an image of a CA fox which I used for this drawing.

I think all my dog sketching helped do this guy.

I also spent some time working on the sea gull drawing, it is coming along but not quite ready for display. My next Nature Drawing exercise is to draw a flower. I am either going to have to go raid someones garden, buy some flowers in the grocery store or pick something in a field. Course I suppose I could always draw my one of the miniture cycliman blooms. I have a red minture cycliman plant that is blooming like mad. Hard to believe now that when I purchased this plant it looked like it was dying. They had neglected the poor thing at the store where it was being sold. I was able to get it at a discount, but look at it now.

That's it for today's post. My goals for the week are to work on my Challenge quilts, (I am way behind) draw my flower exercise, and work on some more finished drawings. Everyone have a good week, and don't forget that comments are welcome.