Heya Steemit! So last week I took a short trip to a museum a couple cities over to do some drawings from life: the American Military Museum in El Monte, California.
Armed with my trusty backpack/chair, a toned sketchbook that I'd been meaning to draw in more, and some basic drawing supplies, I set out.
The parking area immediately displays several vehicles, and, after paying the 5$ entry fee, you get to freely explore the rows of military vehicles the museum has to offer armed with a guidebook with a short description for each exhibit. Tanks, boats, turrets, humvees, etc. are all here to ogle with your little fingery eyes.
I'd wager other artists that come here can spend a whole afternoon focusing in one a single vehicle. I'll probably do that next time.
Only now do I realize I should've been taking progress shots. Next time, I swear. Shown here is an 8" Howitzer and a couple drawings of their M4 Sherman Tank. I was fairly cozy when drawing the Howitzer as, thinking back, I enjoyed the balance of simple and complex shapes, but the sun was starting to beat down on my while sketching out the Sherman (I had the sunburn to prove it), so I moved on. For these I tried following the same general workflow of sketching out the basic shapes in space and then building the detail over top.
Literally this.
The 8" Howitzer and Sherman
I wandered around snapping pictures 'til I found a nice, shaded spot. Luckily, this was also in front of me: an M7 Priest.
Here's the drawing along with some smaller sketches of other, equally-as-neat tanks.
Looping back around, I stopped and drew a Humvee since I literally never do automotive drawings. I (and probably 99% of people) have this issue of knowing I need to do something (like draw more cars or more figures or more cute anime waifus), but my brain does whatever it can to push it back. How do you guys deal with that?
After blocking in the drawing, I think I did a couple more loops around, snapped more pictures, and then sat down one more time to draw this turret. At this point I'd been out in the sun drawing for ~4 hours, so my brain was fried. You can tell here because I didn't label the turret and that empty corner was me throwing my hands up saying "Get me the hell outta here." Three pages in a day is pretty good enough fora guy like me.
"What the hell was this called?" a 22 year-old Californian whispers, looking back through his camera.
Overall, I really liked this place and plan to come back again. Maybe come back with an easel and acrylics or do a bunch of pages of a single subject. I ended up using my ink pens less than I thought, so maybe next time I'll keep them tucked away. A single mechanical pencil is today's MVP.
They're only open Friday-Sunday from 10AM-4:30PM with a really nice admission fee of 5$. Whether you're an artist or just someone an interest in military machinery and are ever in this area, I'd say it's well worth a visit.
*Also, If people are interested, I can post a .zip of the rest of the really disorganized pictures I took from my visit.