Botanicals And A Friend

Day 251: Emboldened by my modest success at drawing recognizable bird species, I have been working on botanicals most recently, trying to be as scientifically accurate as coloured pencils will allow. I've also done a few with graphite pencil, and while I feel that the medium allows me to capture more detail, the temptation to add colour is strong. That said, it's not always about science. The gooseberries (center left) were a bit of whimsy, sketched while sitting in a lawn chair in the Berry Pen. The California poppy (top right) is even more whimsical, and my first real attempt at using watercolours instead of watercolour pencils. I resisted the impulse to outline the plant in ink, a break from my usual style. Top left, you see Buckhorn (Plantago lanceolata), a weed everyone recognizes but can't name. Like the Columbine ("Black Barlow," lower left) and the Honeysuckle (Lonicera), it was a specimen plucked from my yard. And then of course we have Stemonitis middle right. It is a slime mold...not a plant, not an animal, not a fungus, so technically not belonging in this collection at all, but it was the very first Stemonitis I've found and therefore merited a degree of artistic immortality. I mean, what's not to like about slime molds?

A New Challenge

Day 231: Birds are one thing. Botanical art is another, and although I want to be as accurate in my representations as possible in both subjects, plants are infinitely more difficult to portray. Petals/tepals and stamens must be counted, leaf form must be scrupulously observed. Does the leaf clasp the stem? Is it serrated? Notched? Are the stems glabrous or pubescent? Colour and shading are the least of your worries when you're trying to draw a plant with scientific accuracy. Maybe that's why so much botanical art is done in pencil or pen. In fact, I have been hesitant to add colour for fear of losing important detail, but at this point, my detailing skills are marginal, so I'm hiding my sins beneath a wash of pigment. For now, I am content to show the plant in its proper genus; species is going to take a lot more work. (Clockwise from the left: Paeonia, Lamprocapnos, Rhipsalidopsis, Centaurea).

Paint A Mile Of Canvas

Day 227: They say once you have "painted a mile of canvas," almost anyone will notice that their skills have improved. I have now illustrated over 30 birds and a small handful of flowers in addition to making a portrait of my kitty, and I am definitely becoming more familiar with what to expect from the various media I'm using in my sketches. I'm still exploring "style" and am discovering that it may need to be flexible when working with different subject matter. Inking a few feathers on a bird is one thing; applying it to a flower's center is another. I have yet to attempt watercolours seriously, having only recently begun to accumulate the hues I want in my palette. These were rendered in Prismacolor pencil and watercolour pencil, a combination I am coming to appreciate more and more. From the top left: Downy Woodpecker (possibly my best work so far), California Scrub-Jay, Red-Breasted Sapsucker, Northern Flicker, Western Tanager.

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.

Birding With Pencils

Day 216: For the moment at least, I am attempting to make one bird sketch each day. I find that it takes at least an hour and a half (sometimes substantially more), and during the endeavour, I tend to lose track of the passage of time. When I finally reach the "Okay, that does it" stage, the morning has all but disappeared. I am also trying to improve my technique by watching YouTube videos on shading, blending, layering and so on, and it is obvious to me that I still have a lot to learn. Still, for someone who has had absolutely no training in art, I am happy with most of the portraits: 18 to date, one of which I will not make public because I could not capture the colour accurately. Top to bottom, left to right, here you see a female Black-Headed Grosbeak, a Piping Plover chick, Northern Cardinal, male Black-Headed Grosbeak, and a head study showing the differences in the field markings between Golden-Crowned and White-Throated Sparrows, often confused by novice birders who only catch a glint of golden yellow on the forward portion of the head. Each drawing was made from photos I have taken of the "locals" with the exceptions of the Plover chick (reference image from a friend) and the Northern Cardinal (a species we do not have in western Washington).

More Birds

Day 210: Believe me, no one is any more surprised than I am by these sketches. A month ago, I was telling friends that I couldn't draw a recognizable cardboard box, and I meant it. The few things I have drawn well (a portrait of my poodle, done when I was about 11, a Sphinx moth and a handful of pen-and-ink backcountry landscapes) were works I considered "happy accidents." However, there was a clue among those few successes: the love I felt for the subject matter. Perhaps that hint explains these birds, at least in part. Anyone who has ever exchanged more than a few sentences with me will have discovered that I am a "bird person," something which goes beyond mere birding/birdwatching. I try to get inside their heads, to figure out how they think, why they do what they do, to understand the way they perceive a world which is very different from my own vision of it. I attempt to communicate with them on their level, learning a few carefully modulated phrases in the conceptual spoken language of the crows, for instance, or refraining from smiling when a chickadee is eating from my hand lest the bird interprets the upturned corners of my mouth as the beginnings of a predatory threat. I do not make eye contact until the bird initiates it, allowing it to be the one who makes the first social gesture. There is no question that I love my "birdies," so please indulge me as I present another set of portraits of the friends who come to my yard: male and female Rufous Hummingbirds, Cedar Waxwing and Steller's Jay.

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.

How To Draw A Bird

Day 198: A month ago, I was telling an artistic friend that I couldn't draw a cardboard box well enough to make it recognizable, and it was true. She encouraged me to keep trying, pointed me toward another artist whose explanation of perspective was very helpful (at least it taught me to draw the cardboard box so that it didn't look like someone had sat rather heavily on it) and, bolstered by that small success, I invested in a couple of cheap sketchbooks. For the last week or so, I've been drawing something every day. Birds have been a recurring theme, although they haven't been my only subjects. Another friend suggested that I buy John Muir Laws' "Guide to Drawing Birds." I did, and here you see the results of the first lesson. Laws' system was for a pencil sketch, but once I had inked in my "wobbler," I decided he needed some colour. Since I hadn't illustrated facial markings, I turned him into a Yellow Warbler. The pencil and ink drawings at the top of this image show the various stages of my work, first creating a basic bird shape with a few lines, an oval and a circle, into which I "carved" the arcs of neck and throat. Then I added detail to the body, face, wing and tail to show the major feather groups, following that with drawing individual feathers. In the penultimate phase, I applied ink with a fine-point Sharpie. Then, not having a "wobbler" to pose for me, I sat at the kitchen table with Roger Tory Peterson in hand as a guide to colour. For a first attempt at drawing a realistic bird, I don't think I did half bad.

Proper Perspective

Day 172: I have often remarked to friends that I have no artistic talent whatsoever, at least as far as putting a medium on paper or canvas is concerned. My "art" is fiber art. I create with threads and yarns (and sometimes create those very yarns and threads in the first place). That said, when I was actively hiking several hundred miles each month, I kept a journal to document the events of the day, illustrated with a Sharpie since it was the only pen available which didn't bleed through the paper of the book. I developed a scribbling style which was quite effective for rocks and trees and mountainous horizons, but when it came to drawing a coffee mug or a sign on the trail, I could never get the perspective right. Since the journal was for my own enjoyment, it didn't really matter that you couldn't tell my tent wasn't an elephant in repose, but I was dismayed by my inability to translate what I was seeing to a flat surface.

One of my sisters-of-the-heart is a talented artist. As I have monitored her activities in classes and on line, I was taken with one of her instructors whose style seemed to be along the lines of my own scribbles. I began following him on Facebook just in time to tune in for a two-hour lesson in perspective. His simple "one-point" method inspired me to make this sketch today in Sharpie and watercolour, drawn entirely from my imagination. While still not exactly what I'd call "artistic" when stood side-by-side with Patty's paintings, the technique helped resolve my issues with perspective. Our other sister dubbed my picture "Tippy Under the Tree." Hey, if they both recognized him as a cat, I must be doing better.