Whaling Ship

The wife and I recently went to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.  At the museum they have the Whaling ship, Charles Morgan, the oldest whaling ship still in existence from the 1840s.  So while this is not the Morgan, it is a Whaling ship from a book on the industry.  I find the ships and the tales fascinating and repulsive at the same time.  I admire the handwork and courage of the men on these ships, it is just unfortunate they made their living killing whales and cutting them up.  I really liked the artwork from the book and used it was a teaching device with pen and ink.

Yacht with sails

This is a pen and ink drawing of a yacht with its sails fully filled and making way to its journey's end.  I don't remember where I got this picture but it is not one I took but it was a bit of an experiment in using the ink to depict the darks and lights.  The sailing ships always have great bits of details to make sketches more interesting.

Old sailing ship

SO sort of a long hard day at work.  Today's gem is a pencil sketch of an old sailing ship with the sails partial reefed in or being dried I am not sure.  This are part of the sanity sketches, I enjoy them even if they don't really make sense all the time.

Breeches Buoy system

Winslow Homer depicted this life saving system in this famous painting.  I found a picture from WWII, where the US Navy used the system to transfer sailors between ships.  It really makes you appreciate the helicopter today.  Below is Homer's painting from Wikipedia commons.  I would hope to be half the artist Winslow was and I would consider myself a success.

The painting process - The "Yawl" Sloop sailing yacht

Above is the process I used for the oil painting of the sailing boat which is called a Yawl based on the configuration of the sails and masts.  I started with the pencil sketch and I liked the results.  I then did a colored pencil study for figuring out my colors.  I darkened the sea in the foreground and greyed the sky on the horizon since I liked it more than the yellow grey of the sketch.  I don't always follow this process but I find I get better results if I work these things out before commiting to the actual oil painting.

Tug, part 3

Happy Sunday night, this is a simple black and white pen study of a tug with a line back to a tow.  This is an exercise in practicing ship drawing but also a way to look at a picture and plan out the light and dark sections.

Schooner Amistad

I am not who made this ship but it is a re-creation of the Schooner Amistad.  This ship was transporting slaves from Africa and they managed to free themselves and then landed in the U.S.  They were not re-enslaved and it was a historic first in the U.S.  This re-created ship visited D.C. a few years back and this is a pencil sketch of her.