DONE!!!

 Whew!

As you no doubt recall, back on the first of February, my friend Tina proposed that the members of our Zoom sketch group draw (in addition to our regular practice)  a bird-a-day during the month.  Since I am rather fond of birds, naturally I said "Sure, why not?"

I discovered, during that month (thankfully, the shortest one), that I really, really, really hate drawing feathers.  I never want to draw or paint feathers again.

But I did it!  28 days, 28 birds!  It was challenging, and sometimes even fun, and I liked two of the pieces enough to frame them.  Sometimes I used ink and watercolor, and sometimes drew digitally on the iPad, though most of the time I used just watercolor.  When I ran out of my own photos to draw from, I went searching online and learned about a few birds I'd never heard of before.  

So here are the final week's birds -- three of these were drawn and painted digitally.  Can you tell which ones they are?  (Answer at the end of the post.)

This is the ten-foot-tall Terror Bird of prehistoric times:

This is an unfamiliar (and endangered) bird I learned about, the Northern Bald Ibis:

Here I attempted to copy an Audubon illustration of a Roseate Spoonbill:

This White-breasted Nuthatch is from my photo, taken at the lovely Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Minnepolis:

I went a bit back in time to draw this fossil of the bird ancestor, Archaeopteryx:

This California Quail was done from my own photo, taken right here in Richland:

For my final bird, I tackled this Raggiana bird-of-paradise:

And that's that.  You probably won't see a bird drawing here again for a long, long time.

But you will see the drawings from our sketch group practice sessions!  This is a fun one we chose last week -- this house on the coast of France was built into the rocks to protect it from frequent storms:

Lovely place.  I could live there!

Now, before the reveal of the three digital bird drawings, you have to get through (or scroll down without reading) my end-of-the-month Books Read report.  Hah.

Books Read in February

A good survey of something I never studied while earning my B.A. in Art History.  I was surprised at how much, after reading his explication, my appreciation of abstract expressionism went up (from about "none" to "a little bit").

I thought I'd read most of this mystery series but somehow overlooked this entry, which is a pleasant romp with academic-minded sleuths in Oxford.

One of the Time-Life "World of Art" series books.  Copley was the first accomplished American portraitist, who later moved to Britain and did well there, too.  Like all of the Time-Life books, a brisk and easy read.

Ditto for this World of Turner volume.  I found them for $1 each at the Friends of the Library used bookshop, back when it was still open.  Sigh.

This was another find at the F.O.L. bookshop.  Short and a bit dull but as I knew nothing about Bach, it was an okay read.

The next-to-last book in my quest to re-read the entire Holmes canon.  

Judith Martin is better known for her long-running etiquette column by "Miss Manners", which is droll and informative, as is this book about a city she loves -- Venice.  A mix of history, current lifestyles (published in the late 1990s), culture, and people-watching observations.  Fun in short doses.

The last book in my re-read Holmes effort, and the best of the four novels. 

This was for improving my piano practice.  Good advice both technical and psychological, and much of the latter also applied to drawing/painting practice. 

Apparently I wasn't quite finished with Holmes -- I had read this decades ago and remembered enjoying this pastiche wherein Sherlock and Watson meet up with Sigmund Freud.  It was a good re-read.

OKAY, now that you've reached the end, the big reveal is at hand:

The three next-to-last birds were all drawn digitally -- the White-breasted Nuthatch, the Archaeopteryx, and the California Quail.  A gold star to anyone who got it right!

Now I am going to spend the coming week NOT DRAWING BIRDS.

Yay!

Have fun out there, everyone, and stay safe.  (I AM NOW FULLY VACCINATED--WHEE!!!!)

Bird by Bird

 All I have for this post is bird art.  Yes, we also had our two regular sketch zoom meetings, during which we drew stuff that wasn't birds, but I didn't like either of the pieces, so I'm not sharing them.  So all you get is seven birds.

Monday's bird was fine, but then I hit a bit of a lull with a couple of perfunctory performances where I wasn't feeling the love for art (or for painting Yet Another Bird), but then things steadily improved with a strong outing on Friday followed by my best work of the week on Saturday.  Sunday wasn't too shabby, either.  

So, here is the Monday bird, a Pied-billed Grebe with a chick crawling up, heading for shelter.   The nest gave me some trouble, but overall I was pleased.

Then came Tuesday and this Juvenile Sandhill Crane.  It felt as if I were just going through the motions, as if I'd hit a slump in my enthusiasm for the "bird a day for a month" challenge.  It's okay, but just that and nothing more.  No flair, no life, nothing that makes it special.  

The same can be said for Wednesday's bird, this Steller's Jay, which is certainly competent, but just not exciting.  

On Thursday, I had a stern talking to myself, and felt determined to Do Better.  I chose a challenging photo reference (one of my own) of a Violet-green Swallow swooping in to feed a fledgling.  While there are still some minor issues with it, I did enjoy drawing it more than the previous two, and felt as if I were getting back in stride.

And indeed, I was definitely back to the high standard I hold for myself on Friday, when I did this Swallow-tailed Gull.  Part of my earlier issues stemmed from using the wrong paper for the medium, which added to my frustrations, but this day the supplies I'd ordered arrived and I was able to work on good quality watercolor paper once more.

Then on Saturday I had a lovely time not only drawing a bird, but drawing three birds AND coming up with my very own composition.  This is not my forte at all -- I like to find something to draw and just draw what I see, but this time I had an idea about doing falcon eyes, and it just sort of all came together.

I drew a Prairie Falcon on the left, a Peregrine Falcon in the middle, and a Gyrfalcon on the right, varying their poses and coloring.  Then I tossed in the Eye of Horus for extra fun (Egyptian sky god, typically depicted as a falcon).  I like how it turned out.

Yesterday it was back to the standard "find a picture and draw it" method.  I chose a Puffin, and used the good watercolor paper again, and I'm quite sure it made a difference.  Much less frustration all round.

And now there are only seven more days to go in this bird-a-day project -- whew!   

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!

Art, Sunny Dogs, More Art

 The Zoom sketch practice sessions this past week were not really to my tastes, but I gave them a good try anyway.  The first was a truly weird tree snag in Monument Valley:

Yes, that's really what it looked like.  My sister said it looked like the tree was bowing down to the ancient stones, while I said it looked like an alien tree monster on the attack.  Perhaps this says something about how our minds work.  Hm.

The second photo we drew from was a vase in a stone window, which I found Much Too Yellowish overall.  Yellow is horrid because when I try to take a good photo of my art to share online, any yellows invariably come out looking overly vivid, and I have to work at getting things to look right.  Most vexing!

And now, here is our Dachshund Interlude for today:

While my friends in the Midwest were dealing with temps in the negative numbers (and plenty of snow) and while my friends in the Puget Sound were experiencing endless gray, rainy days, I was lounging in the backyard with the Hounds, feeling too warm at times.

However, this is all slated to change this coming week, with a forecast of HIGHS in the 20s for quite a few days in a row.  Brrrrrr. 

I will have tasks to occupy myself with indoors, though.  Our Zoom practice leader, Tina, decided that she was going to draw a bird a day during February.  She suggested the rest of us try it too (separate from our regular art sessions).  And of course, we all gamely said, "Sure, why not?"

Well, I will tell you why not:  It's EVERY.  SINGLE.  DAY. 

Now, I like birds.  I've drawn an awful lot of them over the years.  Still, this is a commitment, and after the fourth or fifth bird in a row, I was already tired of them.  Feathers are hard.  But I am doing it, and we are all sharing are progress in order to encourage each other.  Yay.

Anyway, for the next few weeks, there will be lots of bird art here.  At least it's a short month.

My February 1 bird was a toucan, from a photo off the Web.  I drew it digitally on the iPad:

For February 2, I chose to work from my own photo of this Bohemian Waxwing, drawn the old-fashioned way with pen and watercolor:

February third's bird was also from my own photo of a Black Oystercatcher, which I drew using pencil, watercolor, and colored pencils:

By February 4, I was tired of looking for bird photos to work from, and decided to deconstruct the birds instead by drawing the various types of feathers:

On February 5, I had a very busy day and wound up with little time for drawing, so I did a quick and rather rough pen and watercolor sketch (also from my own photo) of this Osprey bringing a stick to its nest platform:

February 6 was a banner day for bird drawing.  I opted for an extinct bird, and found a lovely pic of an old watercolor rendering of this delightful Dodo.  This was the first time in this daily exercise where I had a grand time, as I really liked the rendering style.  I was so happy with this result that I framed it!

Yesterday was Superbowl Sunday, or as nerdy birders refer to it, Superb Owl Sunday, when they like to amuse themselves by posting photos of owls everywhere while snickering.  Okay.  Whatever.  It seemed like a good day to draw this lovely Barn Owl:

So, I made it through the first week -- whew!  Only 21 more bird drawings to go....

....ARGH.

Wish me luck!

Dogs, Art, Rinse, Repeat

Here we are again, after another week of walking the Hounds and drawing stuff.  Yay.

Someday this may change, and I do hope it does so by this summer, so I can Go Somewhere Else.  ANYWHERE else.  On Wednesday, I am scheduled to get my first Covid vaccine injection, and if I can manage to get that second shot in a timely manner, this travel goal may actually be achieved.  Fingers duly crossed!

So, meanwhile...the Hounds and I took a walk at a natural area here in Richland called Chamna, which looks an awful lot like the Columbia Point area but without the river views.  

It's still an interesting place for a stroll, and the trails are mostly empty of other people -- always a plus these days.

We had snow the day before -- about an inch fell, but by evening most of it had melted, except for shady areas.  We did run into a few short stretches with a bit of this leftover snow, but otherwise it was plenty warm enough.

The  Hounds didn't seem to mind.

For art this week, we had two Zoom sketch practice sessions.  We chose a monochromatic Japanese bell for the first one, which I rendered using water-soluble ink brush pens (brand name:  Tombow).

For our second session, we chose a challenging landscape scene with vivid colors, which I enjoyed a lot.  I used watercolor alone for this one:

Just for fun, I decided to draw YET MORE PORTRAITS of the Good Omens characters, Crowley and Aziraphale, using colored pencils.  I chose two views from the same scene, at the end of the first episode, where the angel and demon have realized they misplaced the Antichrist.  They are sitting in Aziraphale's bookshop, where Crowley the demon bemoans his fate by asking, "Why did the powers of Hell have to drag me into this anyway?"

Aziraphale replies that perhaps it's because of all those memos Crowley sent to his employers (AKA, Hell) boasting about what a great job he'd been doing on Earth, to which the demon says, "Everyone stretches the truth in memos to head office.  You know that."

And the angel replies, "Yes, but you told them you invented the Spanish Inquisition...."  

So that was fun to draw.  

Nearly last, but hardly least, here is a pic that relates to nothing whatsoever in this post, but it's just cute.  Truman demonstrates how to wear his leash with panache:

And really last, but not least, here is another Adorable Dachshund Pic of my favorite place to read, the chaise in my "library" room:

To find out what I've read so far this year, see my previous blog post:  

Books Read: January 2021

That's it for now -- stay safe out there!