Drawing six similar objects
will teach you to observe details.
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| Reliant rigged as a sloop. |
In the normal course of things, you’re not going to see many
square-rigged vessels here in mid-coast Maine (although you could see USS Constitution if you drive down
to Boston). You’ll see fore-and-aft rigs, where the sails run above the keel
rather than perpendicular to it.
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| A Bermuda-rigged sloop. This is the most common silhouette you'll see wherever pleasure boats congregate. |
A boat’s sails all suspend from a vertical spar called the
mast. This transmits all the power of the wind pushing the boat through the
water. It’s really a marvel of engineering, especially since the kinks were
worked out before the age of composite materials. There are some other spars
whose names will be useful to know: booms, which run along the bottom of the
sails, and gaffs, which get raised up in the air. Not every sailboat has gaffs,
but they all have at least one mast and boom to hold the sails taut.
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| A gaff-rigged catboat. |
A catboat is small and has a single sail on a
single mast set well forward in the bow, or front of the boat. (I
think this would be the perfect painter’s boat, especially if I could find one
towable with my Prius.)
A sloop also has one mast, with only one sail in front
of the mast. If that head-sail multiplies, your boat has morphed into a cutter.
Reliance, the
1903 America’s Cup defender, could be rigged as either a sloop or cutter. I drew
Reliance to illustrate that
single-masted boats can be gaff-rigged as well as Bermuda-rigged. She was a peculiar
thing, built only to win America’s Cup and then sold for scrap. Like all
transitory things, she was, oh, so pretty.
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| A ketch. Angelique is far prettier. |
Ketches and yawls have two masts, with the back (mizzen)
sail smaller than the front sail. The difference is that in a ketch (like Angelique) the aft mast is meant to push.
It’s pretty big. A yawl's mizzen sail is very wee, almost vestigial, and is way
to the back of the boat. It’s basically an air rudder, used to keep things in
balance.
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| A yawl (or y'all, for those of you from the south). |
Schooners started out having two masts, but three-masted
schooners were introduced around 1800, and the spars proliferated from there. The
only seven-masted schooner, the steel-hulled Thomas W. Lawson, was built in 1902. It was 395 ft. long.
While you might run across Victory Chimes, a
three-masted schooner out of Rockland, the rest of the Maine windjammer fleet
have two masts. A schooner's forward mast is shorter than its mainmast, giving it an appearance of eagerness. Schooners come in all kinds of sail configurations.
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| A schooner's foremast is shorter than its mainmast. |
Your assignment is to find a photo of each of these sailing
vessels and sketch them out as I did, paying particular attention to where the
sails attach to the masts, the angles at which the gaffs are running, and the height
of the masts in relationship to the length of the hull.
If you aren’t interested in boats, you can do the same
exercise with cars, motorcycles, or varieties of apples; I don’t care what they
are, just that you have six objects from the same class of objects.
The point of this exercise is not to create six beautiful
boat drawings. It is to show you how much you learn by sketching. At the end of
it, you should have a clear sense of why sketching in the field is a far better
preparation for painting than taking photos is.
Remember, those of you who love boats: we’ll be sailing with Captain
John Foss on the most beautiful of all windjammers—American Eagle—in June,
studying watercolor painting on the move. For more information, see here.
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| My little assistants. I drew the boats and they colored. |
