Birds, A Tail Fin, and SNOW

 The "draw a bird every day in February" exercise continues!  I have made it 14 days in a row now, and am starting to find it less onerous.  Sometimes it's even fun.  

This Avocet, for instance, was most enjoyable -- I was able to get the reflections by drawing it on the iPAD and using something called a "smudge" tool, which basically blurs things.

It still took a lot of work, getting the drawing right, and then the colors, and getting the brush strokes down right and blending them.  It's all done using the Apple Pencil stylus, which I can draw with just like a pencil, or tell it to draw like a paintbrush.  Quite challenging to get the details -- here are two close-ups:

The rest of the week's birds were all done the old-fashioned way, freehand with pencil, pen, and brush.

For a slight departure from the usual bird portraits, I drew these eggs and painted them with watercolor:

This Ivory-billed Woodpecker was done using water-soluble ink pens (Arteza Inktonic pens), which come in a wide variety of colors.  I wound up liking the tree stump better than the bird.

The rest of the birds were drawn from my own photos (as was the Avocet). I was lucky one year to be able to watch an Anna's Hummingbird raise its young from egg-sitting through fledging, and got some lovely photos.  This was drawn in ink, watercolor, and colored pencil:

This is a warbler named the Common Yellowthroat.  I managed to snap a pic just as it caught its breakfast:

And I also got a great shot of this Double-crested Cormorant catching a sculpin:

The two birds above were done in watercolor.  This Cinnamon Teal was drawn in ink and watercolor:

Halfway through the challenge -- whew!

And of course, we also had our regular Zoom sketch practice sessions.  The first was a landscape that I wasn't terribly enamored of, and which gave me some problems, but it turned out decent enough (straight watercolor):

For the second meeting, we chose an unusual subject -- a photo of just one part of a classic car (BelAir) showing a lot of reflections of blue sky and clouds, and a great view of the fabulous tail fin.  I had a blast with this -- drew it in pencil first, then used mostly dry-brush watercolor for all those challenging details.  

I was quite pleased with how it turned out, especially the tail light.  There were a LOT of fiddly little areas of color in that part!

Okay, that's it for art.  In other news, we had actual WINTER!  We had lucked out thus far, with only two light snowfalls since winter kicked in, both of which melted within 24 hours.  Well, that luck ended this past weekend, when we got a good 8-10 inches dumped on us over two days.  

Pippin enjoyed himself with it, while Truman is not seen in these pics because he was hunkered under the covered patio.  

Look at that silly little snow hound go!

Hopefully, this is a short-lived blast of Winter, and the temps should rise above freezing by Tuesday.

Stay warm and dry, everyone!