Spruce Grouse Sketch

The nickname for Spruce Grouse is "fool's hen".  These ground-foraging birds are described as behaving as if they are tame.  The irony is Spruce Grouse inhabit northern coniferous forests in such remote areas that research on the species only spans about 30 years.   

On my recent trip to Manitoba to see Polar Bears in Churchill, I went birding with friends at Riding Mountain National Park and enjoyed a great experience watching a flock of grouse foraging.   We spotted six of them, a group of males and females.

Of course, they immediately scattered when we stopped, some running into the woods, others flying into spruce limbs.  The species' ability to remain still for long periods and the excellent camouflage quality of its plumage combine to help it avoid predators.

When a Spruce Grouse remains still, it is very hard to see, disappearing almost completely into the shadows of the environment.  As we stood still photographing the birds at close range, one by one they rejoined each other again as a flock and began foraging all around us.  The forest floor felt like a soft sponge under my feet, cushioned by peat moss and pine needles.  I felt as though I was walking with a group of tamed chickens as they pulled rose hips and berries off stems.  

This sketch included a lot of exploration and I immediately wished I had used watercolor paper.
The sketch is created on Canson 9 x 12 all media paper which is fairly strong but it won't take the changes that Arches cold press watercolor paper will tolerate.  The blue on the bird is ultramarine darkened with burnt sienna and sepia, although it looks more blue here than the actual sketch. Creating this sketch gave me practice in creating the suggestion of feathers, as well as, a review of mixing greens.  

I started out using ultramarine with arylide and the resulting greens were not cool or bright enough.  I like to use the same blues throughout, but I switched to phtalo blue with arylide to create the green and this combination was more to my liking and more closely resembled the colors of the flora on the forest floor.

I added a wash of diluted ultramarine blue as a layer over part of the background to help unify the yellows and greens with the blue in the main subject.  It also helped the sketch look less cluttered.

One of the many benefits of practice--if you've forgotten it, here's where you remember.  If you didn't know it, here's a safe place to discover it!

Wishing you a Happy Holiday season and hoping you will find some relaxing moments for sketching and painting!

To see more images of Spruce Grouse and read more about the journey that took me to see them, visit my blog posts on my journey to Churchill to see Polar Bears at Vickie Henderson Art.

Carolina Chickadee in Snowy Holly

I have several nature-related traditions during the winter months that keep color and inspiration in my life. One of these is making home-made bird suet as a treat for my feathered winter friends. 

The second is painting birds in watercolor!  As I was going through my reference photo files recently, I ran across this chickadee that I painted in January of 2009, along with photos of the progression of the painting. It contains some of my favorite elements of a sketch--looseness and and a splash of color among neutrals.

I start my paintings with a sketch, a map of sorts.  The sketch above is loose in some places and more detailed in others.  I like some suggestion and mystery, but I also enjoy the details that define the bird species.  Both of these elements bring the artist's emotion into the work.  Not only does the viewer see a rendition of the subject, they also enjoy a wholistic expression of the artist's experience--the magic of art. Invariably, as the artist focuses deeply on the subject being painted, that emotion comes to life.

Have you ever watched the behavior of Carolina Chickadees near the feeder?  They are tiny, fairly-like creatures, voicing their opinion about everything with "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" calls.  In the winter they travel in mixed flocks with Tufted Titmice and Downy Woodpeckers visiting feeders in a rotating fashion.  All that company encourages lots of vocalizations.

Painting snow presents a fun challenge in watercolor.  The snow is created with the white of the paper giving you plenty of opportunity to paint negative space or the space around the snow as you create the flow of color and light that leads the eye through the painting.

This sketch is primarily made up of neutrals with a splash of color, an arrangement I find particularly appealing for its subtlety.  I used ultramarine blue, vandyke brown and sepia to make variations of gray and brown for my neutrals, and added quinacridone gold to the blue to create the greens and Winsor Deep Red for the berries.  Use of the same base colors, the blue and brown, throughout, unifies the colors in the painting.

Bringing the subject's colors into the sketch early allows you to shape the background colors and areas of dark and light to highlight the main subject effectively.   The branches are shaped by wetting the paper and adding color in the direction of the shape of the limb.  As the paint is drying, more color is added to the shaded areas, giving it its rounded appearance.

While painting, stepping back or away from the painting from time to time helps to bring fresh eyes.  I want the colors and the lights and darks to lead my eyes to the subject and through the painting so the viewer can take in the whole affect.  In this sketch, the darks, primarily the branches, lead the eyes to the chickadee in a v-shaped fashion and beyond to the edge of the paper.  The contrasting berries point to the bird like an arrow, faintly reappearing on the opposite side of the bird (below) to lead the eye off the page.

Carolina Chickadees use an intricate network of tiny muscles to fluff out the more than 2000 feathers on their body in the winter months, creating a warm insulation of air between feathers.  They visit suet and sunflower feeders, giving our yards the lively gift of activity during winter months.

Carolina Chickadee in Snowy Holly was created in watercolor on Canson, Montval Field, All-Media Book, 90 lb Cold Press Watercolor Paper.

Links and resources:

For more on negative painting, you may enjoy:  Creating Fall Leaves and Don't throw out the kindergarden efforts.
Montval Field All Media Book at Dick Blick art supplies.
Carolina Chickadee at Cornell All About Birds.

Using Your Sketchbook to Jump-start Your Painting

I don't think it's unusual for artists to feel anxious when they begin a painting.  As Ann K. Lindsay, my teacher and mentor expressed it:  "Art is our heart coming right out of us onto the paper, into the world; no wonder we feel so vulnerable...."

Sometimes after I create a drawing for the painting and add the resist to protect desired white areas, I take a deep breath in preparation to begin...and I'm not ready to paint!

The hesitation can be a need to warm up and get rid of nervous jitters, a need to play a little before you get down to the business of painting on watercolor paper.  No one wants to mess up a carefully rendered drawing.  This particular painting, "Common Yellowthroat at Seven Islands" was a commissioned painting, as well.  The desire to please a customer can add a little more tension to the mix.

I also wanted to use Prussian Blue in this painting, a blue that is similar in hue to Cerulean but more transparent. I was not sure how the colors I most frequently use in my palette would mix with this shade of blue since I had not experimented, so, I got out my sketchbook.

Your sketchbook comes in handy as a wonderful tool in this situation.  Great for playing and loosening up. Great for color exploration.  And great for working out hesitations before you get started.  As you can see below in the squares and blended mixtures, I am comparing blues and adding yellow and red to check out the combined colors that result.  All the pigments you see listed are Winsor Newton paints except for DeVinci Permanent Rose.

You can create a reference for color blends and their shades by painting squares on a page that document what happens when you blend two colors in gradual steps.  The example below is an exploration of greens created by a friend of mine.  At each end of the row you will find the pure tube color; in between are the shades created by varying the amount of color added.  The square in the middle represents about equal parts of both colors.  As you move to the left the color becomes more yellow; to the right, the color shade becomes more blue.  This exercise is an excellent way to get acquainted with new colors in your palette and discover the variety of combinations that can be used to create green.  

Below you see another way to make a color study.  When making studies like the one above and below, I recommend using watercolor paper when possible.  Watercolor paper will give you a truer sense of how the colors will look in the actual painting.   

Below you see the Common Yellowthroat in my sketchbook surrounded by the trial of pigments I used in the painting:  Prussian Blue, Burnt Sienna, Aureolin Yellow, Indian Yellow, Sepia (on the bird's face and in the twigs), Permanent Rose, and Winsor Violet.

Now I'm ready to paint!

To see more sketchbook practice visit:  Sketchbook as a map and Yellow Glow Behind the Robin

Watercolor cards for reference
Common Yellowthroat sketch in ink and watercolor
Cornell on Common Yellowthroat

The Sketchbook as a Map for Your Painting

A sketch is the artist's road map, like a tool for planning your journey.  Besides being its own form of art and a record of observations, turning to your sketchbook to work out decisions about your painting before you start can be invaluable.

Before I started my painting of this Northern Harrier, I had a number of decisions to make.  As soon as I received the request for this painting to honor a friend, I had a good idea of the posture I wanted the bird in for this painting, and I also had an idea of the way the background would look--open rolling fields common to east Tennessee. Decisions about color, values, and a landscape arrangement that would best highlight this bird were next.  To help, I turned to my sketchbook for color mixing and to make value studies.

Above left, you see a pencil sketch of the values, relative lights and darks for the landscape, and to the right another sketch of the same arrangement using watercolor. It was this little sketch to the right that gave me the first glimpse of the scene I had in mind.  I was still exploring colors at this point, deciding whether to use Payne's gray more prominently, or to remain with French Ultramarine, my favorite blue for mixing with Burnt Sienna to create neutrals.  You can see some of the neutrals possible in the first image above, along with a nice selection of autumn greens made with Quinacridone Gold and French Ultramarine.  Below, another series of color explorations with Payne's Grey on watercolor paper.

In the end, I settled on the colors that were the most pleasing to my eye and familiar to me, Winsor Newton's French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, Raw Sienna, Quinacridone Gold, and a touch of New Gamboge.  All other colors you see are made from this primary palette.

Unlike other hawks that hunt from a perch, the Northern Harrier hunts for small mammals gliding low over open fields to find its prey, aided by its acute hearing. Historically this species was especially impacted during the spraying of DDT in the 1970's. Northern Harriers have a unique and spectacular flight display called, 'sky dancing', involving high speed climbs, dives and spiraling loops to attract their mate. While the nesting of other hawks failed due to egg shells too thin to incubate, Northern harriers were so weakened by the pesticide that they could not carry out their elaborate courtship displays and breeding almost completely stopped. It took many years longer for this species to recover after the banning of DDT in this country.

Though considered stable or slightly declining currently, Northern Harriers are impacted by the loss of wetlands, prairies and changing farming practices.

11 x 14 watercolor on Arches 140# coldpress paper.

Links and resources:

To see the first post on this painting visit:  A Northern Harrier Hunting
More about the use of your sketchbook in creating a painting in:  The Richness of Watercolor
You may also enjoy visiting my Purple Martin painting, showing a different approach to painting a bird in its habitat.

Brother's Plant--Part II

My unfinished sketch of the pot of hen-and-chicks is moving forward in interrupted increments, as in, whatever time I can grab before and after office hours.  

I discover as I paint, what kind of mood I'm in.  Sometimes I'm satisfied with a very loose and undefined result, other times I want to see more detail.  Most often I like a combination.  In this case, I was drawn to the rosette shapes of the flowers and the spilling over, the cascading of the rosettes as they multiply.  So I printed a black and white copy of one of my photographs and sketched some rosettes in pencil on the sketch page to get a better feel for their layered petals.

Next, I wanted to reclaim some of the rim of my pot from the too-wet wash that spilled over the edge, as well as, the edge of the lower opening of the pot.  Above you see the small size scrub I used.  For more about this scrub brush and the process of scrubbing see the link at the end of the post.  Below you see the result of lifting out some of the paint with the use of my scrub brush, water, and a tissue for blotting.

I created some loosely defined rosettes in the top of the pot with negative painting, that is, painting the space around the petal rather than the petal itself.  This is fun.  I believe negative painting and softening edges are two of my favorite approaches to painting.

Below, you see the page spread as it looks today--still unfinished, but becoming more of what I want to see on the page.      

For more about using a scrub brush visit:  Sketching a Limpkin.  For more about negative space visit:  Search for a Swainson's Warbler.  The first post on this sketchbook spread is:  My Brother's Plant

Sketching Birds in the Backyard

Sounds easy enough.  But there is definitely a shift between photographing birds and sketching them.  And another gigantic shift between sketching from a photo and trying to capture birds while they're moving around!  So what you see below is today's attempt.  My solution for everything that doesn't come easily....practice!

Whey all my busy hummingbird activity ended earlier in the month (last observed visit October 11th), I took all but one hummingbird feeder down, hung a suet basket with homemade suet, a sunflower seed feeder and put out a plate with a mix of each.  The bird-y word got around fast.

It is such a joy to watch these birds--cardinals, mockingbirds, chickadees, titmice, wrens, downies, nuthatches--at the bath and the feeder.  If you sit and observe for a while, you can tell which are the juveniles by their behavior, especially at the bird bath.  I had the joy of watching young chickadees trying to figure out how to drink without getting wet.

My bird bath sits crooked.  No matter how many times I straighten it and pile rocks around it, it always shifts. On this occasion a cardinal was perched drinking and two chickadee juveniles, one after the other, ended up in a spot where the water had shifted away from the edge.  It was a chuckle to see them stretch, nearly tip over, and flutter to upright themselves and keep from falling into the water.  They next landed on the opposite side to drink.  I mean, you bathe only when you want to, right?  

And I got this special mockingbird treat during another time I sat on the patio to observe.  What a hoot, to watch this mocker grab the back ball shaped tops that hold the feeder together.  At first I thought he/she was after an insect.  But then when he tried more than one angle, and moved on to try each one, I realized it was a juvenile trying to see if that big, fat, black, berry-looking thing was tasty!

My response to that stare, "I promise, I didn't do it!"

Seeing a Lantana

Seeing is a big word when it comes to making art.  In fact, seeing is everything.

Seeing your subject, the shapes, the detail, focusing in and capturing what makes it of interest to you in the first place.  And simplifying, focusing out to capture the essence, the larger shapes and values, without becoming distracted by detail.  Both are necessary, a balance that only practice and preference can achieve.

Sketching outdoors is relatively new to me.  I'm more prone to snapping reference photos and painting later through this record and my experience.  But I've seen beautiful work done on the spot.  So I keep giving it a try to see what happens. Because I'm embarking on an exploration and only looking for what new I can discover, I'm finding myself delightfully free of expectations.

I've recently done some practicing on my patio, making a retreat to the cooler in-doors easy when I've had enough of the heat and mosquitoes.  My main goal has been practicing the focus required, learning to filter out distractions and decide just how I want to capture the subject.  Below, you see the end result of my first try to capture my patio pot of Lantanas.

The top photo shows what I completed on the spot.  I sketched without an eraser on this occasion, leaving all the pencil marks, mistakes and otherwise.  Not generally my style.  But I found this okay, even relaxing. The image above is the finished sketch after I added ink and more color.  This is one way to sketch a pot of  Lantanas.  But Lantanas are light, airy.  So this sketch motivated me to try again, see if I could capture more of that lightness in the next sketch.

I created the pencil sketch first, and then began to add color, loose spots of yellow in the area of the blossoms.

Above you see the sketch I finished outside and my working space below.

When I brought the sketch inside, I played with the values, making some areas darker to allow the blossoms to come forward and giving the leaves some variation.  This was nice.  I liked what was happening on the right side of the page.
Above you see the final result, a sketch that expresses something different about what I see in those flowers, a brightness that the first sketch doesn't quite capture.  It's interesting, though, I like both sketches.   But don't they have a very different feel?