This post will make me look like a redneck...
Saturday found me with some free time in the morning. Wanting to sketch nature stuffs and temps hovering below freezing, I opted to draw nature within a cyclopean heated structure called Bass Pro Shop. Springfield is the home of the mega-outdoor-store and I have a love/hate relationship with the place. I won't go into detail, but I am happy that they will let you just saunter around the place with a sketchbook in your hand and draw dead stuff. Here are three that I did before 11am and the hordes of fashionable camo wearers showed up.
I've also been dabbling in wood burning pyrography. Last weekend, I made a piece for my wife's aunt. I had promised her some kind of fox art back around Christmas and finally got to deliver. The second piece is a donation to a fellow I met a month or two ago at a MS Society event. He's wheelchair-bound with MS and was really wanting a piece of artwork to go above his fireplace. I took apart a box spring sometime back around Christmas and repurposed the wood into the elk, here.
Sketching in my side yard during a warm spell last week.
Lastly, the guns! Err...gun. Just the one, but it's a new one. I sold my Masi CX bicycle and put a chunk of the money towards my kid's upcoming braces. The other chunk bought this Ruger LC9s 9mm handgun. The part of me that grew up in a highly conservative Republican household that I still firmly hold onto, is the part that loves to loudly punch holes in paper circles. After buying the pistol out of the back of a barbershop in a satellite town west of Springfield, I took it to another satellite town south of here and an indoor range to figure out how it shoots and get used to the semi auto action of it. I normally handle revolvers. Had a lot of fun, but indoor ranges are REALLY LOUD!!!
Being new to the gun, I was all over on placement. Some hit the center mark, though. Shooting 5-7 yards. Typical selfdefense range.
Comments
I so so so love the woodburned elk, dude. So much. That is really great. I find it inspiring.
A few weeks ago I was burning time and life rambling around a Bass Pro Shop in Florida. What a wild experience. The part I loved the best is the old photos of people fishing in Florida in canoes and rowboats, hauling pretty spectacular fish aboard. HOWEVER, as much as they use the romanticization of the past to sell fishing gear, they certainly don't sell ANYTHING close to a well performing rowboat or canoe. It's a slight misalignment of my values and passions with their passions and I found it delightful and sad at the same time.
I left pretty quick.
At the Bass Pro in Branson, Missouri, they have replica White River/Ozarks Jonboats all over the place and I'm a big fan of those simple folk designs. I imagine the old flats skiffs and sharpies of Florida would be pretty cool, as well. Also if they maybe had an Everglades Skiff thrown in for good measure. I made a scale model of one a year or two ago.