I took myself to Chester Zoo to attempt some animal sketching.\u00a0 It was very entertaining to discover how unco-operative\u00a0 most of the animals were.\u00a0 It was afternoon, and a warm day, so most of the animals were sleepy, even the more active ones were standing or strolling around. Perfect, you would think.<\/p>\n
Well, no.\u00a0 The sleepy ones were sunk into indeterminate woolly heaps, with no visible arms, legs or head.\u00a0 I think they had been taking lessons from the hedgehogs.\u00a0 The lions didn’t, of course.\u00a0 I came upon the pride stretched out on a sandy patch quite near the fence blinking in the sun, or in his case stretched out on his side.\u00a0 I set to, but the minute I put pen to paper, he opened one eye, yawned, stood up and flopped down again.\u00a0 Whether he was irritated by all the people watching him, or\u00a0 genuinely had an itch, I don’t know but he never settled after that and his ladies were no better.<\/p>\n
One of the giraffes was steadily patrolling the side of his house, but I had barely drawn the head and neck, when he went indoors, and all his family with him.\u00a0 The elephants were shy too.\u00a0\u00a0 The onagers were more co-operative, and I managed one or two sketches of them.\u00a0 There is a theory that you can use other members of a herd to complete a sketch, but these fellows had no knowledge of that.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I enjoyed the afternoon battle.<\/p>\n
The upshot of all this is that I will be taking my watercolours next time – yes, there is going to be a next time – as one brushstroke can say more than half a dozen lines, so I may be more successful.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took myself to Chester Zoo to attempt some animal sketching.\u00a0 It was very entertaining to discover how unco-operative\u00a0 most of the animals were.\u00a0 It was afternoon, and a warm day, so most of the animals were sleepy, even the more active ones were standing or strolling around. Perfect, you would think. Well, no.\u00a0 The … Continue reading “The Zoo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":982,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.williamsonfineart.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}