whales

Sketching the Mendo Coast

I found plenty of sketching subjects on a Monday morning drive north from my Caspar digs on the Mendocino Coast: two whales and a rock shaped like an elephant.

My first “whale” was to be found in Westport (population 299) about 15 miles north of Fort Bragg on Highway One.

If you build a whale, they will come. At least that’s what I think the sculpture/creator thought and I did come to sketch it. At onetime you could enter the belly of the whale and recline and watch television. Now it seemed closed to the public with a sign on the white picket fence warning of the Dalmatian. I didn’t see the Dalmatian, so I guessed I would be safe.

Thar she blows!!

Some things are beyond the realm of understanding such is the gray sperm whale in the front yard in Westport. Everyone knows that gray whales are the stars of the Mendocino Coast whale migration not Moby Dick!

Roadside attraction gone bad or failed hotel room, who knows! I sketched it anyway.

I retraced by way south to Blues Beach. My next sketching subject was a large rock which, if your squinted, looked like a pachyderm, hence the name Elephant Rock.

My final whale sketch was alas, a real whale. At least a former one. This was to found at MacKerricher State Park just north of Fort Bragg.

Near the visitors center is a collection of whale bones. The 32 foot gray whale skeleton was what caught my sketcher’s eye.

I seated myself on a nearby picnic table and started to sketch the jigsaw bones of the gray whale.

The gray whale migration should begin in earnest in February as adults would be heading south to their birthing lagoons in Baja California.

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The Whales of Iceland

Whales are some of the most amazing creatures that have ever lived on planet Earth. And one Reykjavik site that really piqued my interest was Whales of Iceland!

This museum is housed in a massive warehouse near the harbor and includes life sized models of all the dolphins, porpoises, and whales found off the shores of Iceland.

This really is a sketcher’s paradise and I found a bench located against a wall and I started to sketch the humpback, blue, and right whales that were suspended from the ceiling.

I was interrupted in mid-sketch, by a Yank (yes there are Yanks working in Iceland!) who informed me that I was not sitting on a bench but on a child’s coloring table and I was about to break it! Opps, so I found a chair and finished the sketch (featured sketch).

A small child provides scale to how large these whales really are. Perhaps she is headed towards the coloring/sketching table/bench.

It was really interesting to see the true sizes of the whales compared to others. I had seen a handful of blue whales off the California coast but you only see small parts of the dorsal side and if you’re lucky, the fluke. Here you could see the entirety of the whales. I was impressive to see just how large the largest animal that ever lived on the earth really is!

For my second sketch I drew the bowhead whale, the whale was so large that it did not fit into the pages of my sketchbook.

The eye of the largest animal on earth: the blue whale.