Monk

Birds and things

Birds at the feeder are having a feeding frenzy...must be the colder weather. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, cardinals, and chickadees today. They are for the most part very polite and take turns. A lot of commotion from hundreds of migrating birds today while they rested in the trees outside. The cold is here.

I like Ryan Haywood's teapot drawing. I like all his drawings. Camilla's beautiful calendar is out.

Twins

Just found out there will be another set of twins in the family!! It seems, Chance is everywhere.
Another chance,... this bicycle may be the future of urban transportation. It has won lots of awards. Very cool. My friend, Julie Dermansky is working on a book about the five months she spent as an embedded photo-journalist in Iraq. Her new studio is in the Lower Garden District, New Orleans.

Stop

Rabbit

looking at rabbits more ....did a live trace in Illustrator from my marker drawing.

Work in Progress: Sketching Cats

Revisiting these two sketches I did a while ago. Will refine the drawings and plan color.
Sorry for the bad photos..click to enlarge.

Yupo Paper

Craig Frazier animations at squarepig.tv. He describes it as discovering he could make his drawings breathe. Nice. More on Craig Frazier at Scamp (Irish Illustrators' Blog) Love his Drawords project!

Experimenting with yupo paper samples I got in the mail today. It is synthetic paper. It resists water, but some watercolor artists are using it. You can get it here . I think I'd like it better for drawing and pen and ink...has a real smooth vellum surface...read more about it here.

Drawing Trip to Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University

Another road trip to Lab of O. Our GNSI group met to do research sketches for the "Common Birds in Decline" exhibit that our local chapter will be doing later this year there, which I posted about before. It was good to finally get to see the real McCoy Common Tern aka Sterna hirundo. I had a female and male and a one-day old chick "skin" as they are referred to. The Common Tern is also referred to as a sea starling. It's wing span, according to its tag, is 772mm or 30.3937 inches. I did the drawing on a cream -toned pastel paper and used HB pencil, along with some graphite and white and orange pastel pencil. The feathers on the breast are an almost pinkish grey while the top feathers are more blue-grey. Also got to see a nesting hummingbird and a ruby throated hummingbird's nest. They were so teeny...just amazing! Also out in the hallway was an astonishing skeleton of a very large snake!! EEK!

Burton Silverman video at SmartFlix

I just watched an amazing video, Drawing: The Language of Vision, with Burton Silverman. Highly recommend. I rented it from SmartFlix and plan on renting the others maybe, I think there are four in all.

Drawing at Lab of O

A fun day... Here are photos from the Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY and some of the Fingerlake Chapter's members of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI), drawing. During lunch we watched a beautiful (live) red-tailed hawk sitting atop the tallest (dead) tree through an elegant Zeiss optical angled spotting scope (staff member told me they go for around $1500!) The telescopes are stationed strategically in the lobby by the pond, the feeders and other places around the Lab of O. I also stopped in at WildBirds Unlimited (gift shop) and got some Christmas Seed Blend for my backyard visitors.

Birds: Real and Imagined

Tomorrow is another day of drawing at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you like birds or are even just curious about what the Lab does, visit their site or new blog called Round Robin here.
There are great photos and stories about birds and the hysterical birders who follow them around.(I think I qualify).
These are some stories too...like the one about the hawk in Southwest Texas that landed on a live wire, burst into flames and landed in a vineyard setting the grapes on fire. And it's more common than you think. Thousands of hawks die each year this way. It gets better... a new wine label called "Burning Hawk" is then born ( I like the label...looks a lot like like the Smoking Loon label...no really) and ten percent of total sales before Thanksgiving went directly to raptor-protection causes.
The room where we will be drawing is really cool. I'll take more photos this time to share with you. Also, you may want to visit their new online Holiday store here for the birdlover in your life.

Cedar Waxwing, Watercolor/Sketchbook
Wooden bird from my collection is by Murray Eisnor of Nova Scotia. He is represented by Lyle Elder and you can see more Folk and Outsider artists here

The first lines are the best

In college, an art professor once explained approaches to drawing and touted " a la prima or the first (lines) are the best." It's true...I usually end up preferring my initial sketches to the finished piece. By the time I've "cleaned up" the image, I've sometimes cleaned away the heart, spirit, and soul of the drawing.... These sketches, still in devlopment, for a folk portrait tribute (sort of) to Larry Downey, an ole time fiddler who passed away in 2001. I like the facial expression in the initial sketch, especially around the eyes, and mouth...he is older, wiser, and more likeable ..like Larry. In the second, he is younger, inexperienced, and slicker...not as likeable somehow. It boils down to a just few lines and shapes, (nose) but they are critical. Maybe will try a looser Ciardielloesque approach with pen and ink with washes.....hmmmm

Sketchbook Experiments

I was so inspired by the sketchbooks of Q.Cassetti and Chad Grohman that I am going to try to work on creating a book that is more dynamic, with more continuity in subject, composition and style. There's a novel idea:) Also I want to think more about the drawing and other applications it might work in... like linocuts, print gocco, pen and ink, silkscreen, digital. This was done in watercolor in a 5 1/2x 5 1/2 inch square sketchbook journal (opens to a 10 1/2 inch spread)that you can find here. It takes all dry media and light washes. They have fabric covers and come in an assortment of colors.
Will finally have my mac back tomorrow. It was out for repair for what seems like a hundred years ago....

Field Trip to Lab of O

Drawing at Cornell Lab of Ornithology and CUMV (Cornell Museum of Vertebrates) today with fellow GNSI (Fingerlakes Chapter) members. Take a virtual tour here... a veritable treasure trove of natural history specimens here. It was a bit overwhelming...where to start?? Settled on a watercolor study of a pin-tailed widow (wydah) ....an exotic bird commonly found in southern Africa named for it's mostly black plummage and really long tail used to attract a mate. I totally underestimated the length of his tail...think I just ran out of paper...Came up for air and lunch (yum) to go from Hope's Way Cafe & Catering. Ate our lunch in the lobby of Lab of O where you can sit and watch the squirrels, nuthatches, canada geese, black-capped chickadees....and a dozen more, or so, birds play and eat together around the feeders, through the enormous ceiling to floor glass windows. Snow was gently falling...it was quite beautiful.

Wild Birds Unlimited has a nice shop there and a big selection of books. Here is one I liked called "An Egg is Quiet" by award winning artist Sylvia Long. Looking forward already to our next visit.

Bird Day

Pastel Drawing: Owl

Speaking of wise....a quick pastel study I did of a great horned owl from a natural history collection at a local museum.

An interview with Lena Corwin on Etsy and directions for a lovely stenciled chest of drawers....

Cornell Plantations: Drawing and Painting

Drawing and painting at Cornell Plantations on the campus of Cornell University tomorrow.
The door to the Ed Ctr where we draw has a nice patina.

Pencil Sketching

This pencil sketch was done as a quick demonstration for a Broome Community College drawing class for which I had been asked to guest speak. For this sketch, I asked the student to look away
while I drew...the sketch of the sheltie, was done from a photograph.

Nina Brooding. Sometimes one only has 10 minutes to sketch and try to capture something that you see in that one moment...If I had had a longer time (she wouldn't sit any longer) I probably would have overworked this drawing. This firstborn child is now 25...still brooding sometimes...but mostly just a beautiful, wonderful, funny, talented, gifted writer and human being.