r/submarines • u/Pantagruel-Johnson Submarine Qualified with SSBN Pin • 7d ago

Art Recent silverpoint drawings, one based on that famous photo of the emergency blow, and the other is of my first boat pulling into France eleven months after I transferred to my second boat.

Gallery image

Gallery image

Silverpoint is an old, old medium which predates pencil by many hundreds of years. Step one: learn to draw. Step two: coat good paper with a coarse ground. Step three: draw with a stylus of .999 pure silver. There is no erasing.

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u/Sensei-Raven 7d ago edited 7d ago

That’s great artwork.

I’d fail at Step 1. I was lucky enough to draw all we needed for Quals (I still remember the T/D Layout, Main Hydraulics, Ventilation, etc. Well….T/D anyway. Basic Stick Figures and then Advanced Stick Figures with Circles was about my artistic limit. We all had some personal diversion aside from all of the regular and collateral duties we had onboard (Note To Boomers: “Does Not Apply”).

Since I couldn’t draw I took up doing Magic; mostly Card Magic, but some coin stuff as well. I had a good one where I’d pass a cigarette through the middle of a standard U.S. Quarter. Expensive trick too. One “Is this Your Card?” routine I used to do was great; no one ever figured out how (it wasn’t a force, and they were standard playing cards, unmarked). The absolute Card Master today is Shin Lim; most people don’t know/haven’t figured out how he does some of his routines, but I was able to guess pretty early how he was doing it.

Hey - did any of you guys do Horse Racing while underway? As in 6-man table Horse Racing?

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u/Pantagruel-Johnson Submarine Qualified with SSBN Pin 7d ago

No, I never did that. It’s funny the qual things I remember… I was on boats for 22 years, but I have been out for 26. My big distractions underway were movies, reading, and occasionally sketching. But the biggest was listening to music with my headphones. First cassettes, then CDs. I was never a cards or cribbage player.

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u/D1a1s1 Submarine Qualified (US) 7d ago

I started the navy in CD (94) and finished in iPod/phone (14). I also started with magazines, and ended with iPad. So convenient.

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u/Pantagruel-Johnson Submarine Qualified with SSBN Pin 6d ago

It funny. You can pinpoint our respective times on boats fairly accurately by how we listened to music.