Recent turtle sketch

Here is a recent sketch, a portrait of an Indochinese Box Turtle, Cistoclemmys galbinifrons, who resides at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. I did this sketch a couple of weeks ago (12/21/07). I'd done a few sketches already that day and was standing near this animal's aquarium, and she (I think she's a she) called to me. I don't mean with words, or even any sound at all--she just seemed to look like "draw my portrait". I intended to sketch her quickly and then move on to the other exhibits, but that wasn't to be. She stayed very still, one eye cocked downwards, watching me watch her, the entire time. I'm pleased with the result, which doesn't happen all the time--most sketches have good elements and not-so-good elements, I'm either "on" or I'm not, this time I was "on", or I should say, we were "on", because I think that this little turtle participated in this venture at least as much as I did.

This species is also called the Flower-Backed Box Turtle, because of the beautiful patterning usually present on the shell. This individual is less gaudily marked than some I have seen in photos, and what she has is partially obscured by algae, but she certainly has a captivating personality, an endearing and winsome face. This species also used to be placed in the genus Cuora, but evidently, recent re-examination of their evolutionary relationships, probably using molecular data, has landed them in the genus Cistoclemmys. Regardless of how we call them, they are among the species caught up in the Asian Turtle Crisis. Don't know what that is? Try http://www.chelonia.org/ for starters.

I did this in a 7"x9" hardbound sketchbook using Pitt brush pens, one of my favorite sketching media--they are very responsive and come in a good array of colors, and they are lightfast and waterproof and don't usually bleed through sketchbook paper, and they don't have that nasty chemical smell of some markers. I like them because they require (or allow) me to be both fluid and committed at the same time--no erasing with permanent marker. All lines are permanent, so you have to be open to creating a drawing that includes all the lines you made, or you have to start over. Bente King used to tell us about an art professor she had back in Denmark--he didn't allow the students to use erasers in his class--"If you can get it right the second time, you can get it right the first time", he would say. I'm not opposed to erasers--I use them when I draw in pencil, usually planning something more formal than a sketch--but there is something liberating about the discipline of not using them, at least after you've made the proverbial "first 1,000 mistakes".

A strange thing happened while I was sketching --I kept getting referred to as "he", usually by parents explaining to their children what I was doing. Now, I have short hair, but no shorter than a lot of women have, and the lighting in the exhibit space was pretty dim, but seriously...