Not Just Birds

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.

Yard Birds

Day 205: I don't want to bore my readers with too many posts of my sketching attempts, but on the other hand, I'm rather proud of what I've accomplished with the help of "Laws Guide to Drawing Birds." Each of these was based on a photo I've taken of the respective species: American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis, formerly Carduelis), Chestnut-backed Chickadee (Poecile rufescens), Purple Finch (Haemorhous purpureus), Pine Siskin (Spinus pinus). In the case of the female Purple Finch, I changed up the background to reflect a behaviour I observed recently. Several Purps settled in on my blueberry bushes in late afternoon and began plucking the blossoms! Cornell advises that they consume nectar by biting the base of the flower. The bushes are now netted and outfitted with mylar ribbon, and now I understand why I didn't get many blueberries last year. The drawings were executed in a combination of ink and coloured pencil, and the wing detail in the Pine Siskin was a real challenge to maintain.

Porch Parrot Head Study

Day 201: As I said to a friend just a few minutes ago, "Ego is a thing." I'm pretty proud of this one, but then, Porch Parrots (Evening Grosbeaks) are some of my favourite people. I did the sketch a few days ago using coloured pencil. I wasn't exactly happy with the way the pencil laid down on the lightly textured paper and was bemoaning the fact that I didn't own a blending stump (tortillon). I could have made one, I suppose, but I didn't want to risk messing up my work with a homemade stump. Then, in the process of looking for something else entirely in my arts cupboard, I found one. I think I'd put it away without any idea of how it was used. I did a test patch on scrap paper, liked the effect, and then took the leap to apply it to my Parrot. It substantially reduced the obvious accumulation of pencil on the "peaks" of the paper and also helped shade the colours. In playing around, I learned that a more rapid stroke warms the wax in the pencil and blends more smoothly, but a slower stroke allows for blending without entirely destroying fine lines. I still haven't settled on a medium for bird portraits, but I am leaning rather heavily toward coloured pencils, perhaps with a wash created with watercolour pencils (a different breed of cat) as an underlay or even as a glaze.