Ideas & Art from Rob Elliott and Christine Cosby
The unpainted canvas just leaning against my studio wall has been bothering me for a while. I bought five 36″x36″ canvases for the Monkey Modern show, but only used four. Flipping through a sketchbook this week, I found this cluster of Proboscis Monkey drawings.
I’ve done a 6″x6″ study to figure out the colour scheme, and later this month, I’ll paint the ornery primate big.
Proboscis Monkey, study, 6″x6″
I just got back from a trip to Arizona with Christine and my parents. I brought a sketchbook along with me, and did a page or two whenever I found a poolside table. All of these sketches are pretty loose, due either to wobbly surfaces, the randomness of my drawing utensils, or good ol’ heatstroke.
There’s nine big pages of sketches, which you can download as a PDF by clicking this LINK. (2 MB)
Here’s a sampling to whet your appetite:
My latest drawing, Ravine Opossums, took a lot of planning. Once I had the idea in my head of how I wanted the piece to look, I had to figure out how to draw a pretty complicated scene.
The first step was getting the opossums right. Until you really study some photos, you don’t really appreciate what a weird beast the opposum is. When you draw it correctly, it looks like you’ve drawn it wrong. This is a challenge.
The ditched shopping carts were tricky as well. Basically three-dimensional mesh planes, the carts took a lot of sketching to figure out. In this case, it was the sad little wheels that brought the drawings to life.
Then there was the beer cans. I wanted the brand to be recognizable, but also localized to my own western Canadian history. It was pretty easy to settle on the busy and colourful Old Style Pilsner can.
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