Copy Cat

One thing I like to do from time to time is copy other people's art, partly just for practice and partly to see if I can learn anything from their style or technique.  I found a book called Natural Histories: Extraordinary Birds which is a selection of works from the American Museum of Natural History Library (Paul Sweet, Sterling Publishing, 2013).  It's a boxed set with a book and a set of loose prints.

I took out the first print, from the mid-1500s, attributed to Pierre Gourdelle, from a French book.  The bird is a White Stork:

This is a woodcut, which I'm not able to do, so I tried copying it with pen and ink and watercolor:

I could have defined the body feathers better (and may go back and do so), but otherwise this was a pleasing experience.

I'm nearly finished with Hawthorne on Painting (it's quite short) and am finding it repetitious.  He basically has one thing to say:  paint spots of color against each other using the proper tonal values and everything will come out right.  And he says it over and over and over and over.  Ah, well.  So it goes.