Final sketchbook Drawings before back to work

Okay, I don’t know how long I am going to be able to keep making at least one new sketch in my sketchbook every day since I’m back to work tomorrow. I have show before that I can keep up making some kind of sketch every day for a whole year before, back between March 2017 and March 2018. Still, some of those were rather ropey, the kind of thing you can dash off in 30 minutes or so or the very good reason that many of them were dashed off in 30 minutes or less. But I only want to make quality sketches in this book, or at least sketches of the best quality I can make. So, here’s fifteen to eighteen.

Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. 

I once saw Charlton Heston in an interview saying that he had been told a story about his casting in C.B.Demille’s The Ten Commandments. He reckoned that someone told Demille that the face of Michelangelo’s statue looked like Charlton Heston. Demille is supposed to have drawn a beard on a Heston publicity photo, and this sealed the deal. In medieval and renaissance iconography Moses is often depicted in art with horns on his head. There are several plausible explanations. Some art historians point to the ancient Middle Eastern tradition of depicting their gods with horns as a symbol of power. Some take a linguistic approach and point out similarities between Hebrew words for horned and shining.

Galapagos Giant Tortoises

I’d love giant tortoises even if they hadn’t helped Charles Darwin formulate the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. Darwin was intrigued by why species on one island would have longer necks than those on another. Although having said that it was his studies of the differences between the beaks of different species of Galapagos finches that really set Darwin thinking. Coming back to giant tortoises, these come in at number 2 on my list of favourite (living) reptiles. Top of the list is the Komodo Dragon, third is the saltwater crocodile, fourth is the King Cobra, and honorable fifth is the Tuatara.

Replica of the Gotheburg passing beneath Tower Bridge.

This is based on a photograph from 2007, although the ship came back to London and did it again in 2022. The Gotheburg is a replica of an 19^th century trading vessel belonging to the Swedish East India Company. It is currently the world’s largest wooden ocean-going sailing ship. The original ship was launched in 1738, and ran aground on the return from a successful voyage to China just 6 years later. By the time that Tower Bridge opened in 1894 the great age of sail might have already passed, but its double bascule design was made specifically to accommodate the masts of tall sailing ships entering or leaving the Pool of London. Prior to the opening of Tower Bridge.

Fighting Stags

I was reading Barry Hearn’s autobiography, and I was struck by a passage in which he described staying on a large estate in Scotland, and turning down the chance to shoot a stag, much to the disgust of the ghillie who had prepared the shotgun. I’m with Barry on this one.