Day 223: My ambitions may well exceed my talent, but at least I'm pointed in the right direction. I am not content with birds. I aspire to creating accurate botanical drawings, preferably in colour using whatever medium lends itself to my hand most readily. So far, that appears to be watercolour pencil, and in fact I've discovered that laying down a layer of watercolour pencil first eliminates most of the white flecks which regular coloured pencil leaves behind on even lightly textured paper. That said, I have also made another discovery: drawing life-sized helps me capture proportion correctly, and perhaps that's why birds came so easily. For the most part, they fit a 5.5" x 8.5" sheet of paper. My subconscious knows how big a junco's leading primary is; it is intimate with the curve of a Porch Parrot's yellow "eyebrow." Even reduced, my mind holds the ratio of a Flicker's tail to its wing. Why? Because I love my birds, and a friend who is quite an accomplished artist advises, "Paint what you love." Yet the skill for drawing a flower's petals seemed to elude me until I realized that I was trying to enlarge the blossom, figuratively trying to draw a mouse in elephantine scale. It wasn't working. Last night, I set a single Siberian Iris stem up in a little vase on the table beside me. If not botanically accurate, at least you can tell it's a flower.
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