Plain Ol' Wood Bison (demo)

Pen & Ink + watercolor, 9x12"

Here's the breakdown of the process, from the initial light pencil sketch, a basic contour (done with a dip pen + India ink), then a couple hours of rendering volume with value through gradations of texture for tone (playing with a new set of Microns for the hatching). I also experimented with using a varnish on the finished piece, after prepping it with regular fixative. This added some luxurious depth + luster, and restored the blacks which got dulled after smothering under the watercolor. PS: This was a tip I always meant to follow up on from Sandy, and so this is dedicated to him.
And then, at the end, I did what I so often do in life; what has marked my artistic deviation from drawing normal illustrations and consequently securing my fate as a cartoonist: I had to go and goof it all up by adding some smartass commentary. This was in part inspired by the lame joke "What did the father buffalo say to his kid on the first day of school? Bye son." And yeah, there wouldn't be any grass around the winter solstice up in our neck of the woods, but that's okay because buffalo also don't think in English, I think.

Recently my Beginning Drawing class decamped to invade our local state office for the Alaska Department of Fish & Game to take advantage of an opportunity to gather reference sketches for their upcoming pen + ink assignment. I decided to get a jump on not only this class but dovetail the demo as an example to show the Pen & Ink group, as we will be taking a different field trip to Sportsman's Warehouse - it can take some logistical planning to accommodate the wildly divergent times for these studio courses this semester (an early morning session bookends every week with a late evening one, neither of which happen to coincide with the operating hours of my normal go-to resource on campus at UAF Museum of the North).

They had slightly redesigned the facility since last year/last time I visited, having taken out the big fish tank in the visitor lobby, and most notably, adding a Plains buffalo mount to the diorama. It brought to mind the recent efforts to reintroduce the native Wood bison to Alaska (albeit in a region that there isn't any record of them being present, according to the overlooked opinion of the affected Native groups). Last summer on another field trip my class got to go behind the scenes at the Large Animal Research Station and we got a bonus sight of the transplanted herd being held temporarily in their pastures. Quite a sight seeing them charge around, with "little" babies gamboling about.

While technically there are largely cosmetic differences between the two subspecies, it's akin to the aesthetic variation between most big, hairy mammals of the north. Which I got permission to quickly grab a couple snapshots of their hooves (hidden from view so I had to jump the ropes), and the moment was captured in turn by a student. As a result I think I now know exactly I want my body to be used for when donated to science, but preferably housed in a closet in the art department, right next to our classroom skeleton.