Broken bottle

What is dangerous trash to everyone else, is priceless treasure to the artist. I found this piece of broken bottle on a sidewalk. I picked it up because it seemed like a rather dangerous thing to leave lying around on a surface where children walk, and because I liked the way the sun's light glinted on it and fell through it. How can one not want to draw such a marvelous thing?

Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary

A nice place to kill a few hours is the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary in Pretoria, where a large enclosure is home to all manner of critters, such as this steenbok:

As one might expect, there is also a large variety of birds, especially waterbirds, such as comb ducks (a.k.a. knob-billed ducks, for obvious reasons):

Blacksmith lapwing (so named because of its call, which resembles a small hammer hitting an anvil):

 Little egret:

 And the ubiquitous Egyptian goose:

Also commonly found at the reserve is the white-faced duck:

and yellow-billed duck:

It is a congenial place to make sketches of birds, something I try now and then when I can work up the courage to try sketching moving targets.

Another weathered leaf

Sketched at Pretoria Botanical Gardens. HB pencil on printer paper, size A5:

Glass, metal and plastic

An empty mustard jar and penny whistle. Couldn't quite capture the metallic look of the whistle's tube. lots of other problems I can see as well, now that the thing is done! But who knows, another few hundred such sketches and they might begin to look like something.

A still life or two

Let's see if Blogger will let me post pictures now. Two recent still life setups, neither really particularly successful:

Blogger acting up again...

Here we go again: I try to upload a picture to the blog, but the software simply flatly refuses. Well, I'll give blogger a day or two to sort out the problem, after which I suppose I'll have to go back to LiveJournal. Sigh...

Apple and banana

I have been struggling to draw this particular cultivar of apple ("Royal Gala"- they are difficult to draw but absolutely delicious); all those intricate little patterns tend to confuse me. I always get hopelessly lost in detail, and after a while I cannot remember which particular little patch of red I am working on anymore. This one does look marginally better than some of my previous attempts, I think, so perhaps there is some progress. Anyway, one of the advantages of this sort of subject is that you get to eat your models after the drawing session, thus destroying all the evidence and ensuring that no one can come and claim that you got this or that little detail wrong.