Watercoloring Birds

My artist friend Joe is staying with us, and artist energy around you is always a good thing. So when he sat down at the kitchen table to draw last night, I got my pencils and paints and the excellent John Muir Laws Drawing Birds book I got for Christmas and painted in my watercolor sketchbook from a photo I took a couple of years ago. 

And just like that, Art is calling me again. Yay!

Almost There

FINALLY I had a day to spend a few hours painting.  It was wonderful.  The house is quiet, I put on some mood music, got out knives and paint and my Kindle for a reference photo (love that), and just played. 

Knife painting doesn't feel that much unlike finger painting to me.  It's very tactile, very much about the patterns IN the paint as well as the patterns the paint makes.  I adore this aspect of it.  I thought feathers would be a lot of fun to paint with a knife, and I was right. 

I have a few little tweaks I want to make with this, a few areas that need a little more blending or color adjustment, and I want his beak and eye to be very realistic, but he is pretty close to finished.

There seems to be a lot of confusion around species and subspecies of Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus).  I think that's what this guy is, but I see some with the black barring in their red breast feathers and some without.  A lot of the birds that were once classified as subspecies of T. haematodus are now getting their own classifications too.

At any rate, they are funny, active little birds whose diet consists mainly of nectar.  It's getting popular at many zoos in the US to have a large walk-in aviary with lories and lorikeets flying loose, and you can buy a cup of nectar to feed them.  I get a huge kick out of this, and both the Nashville and Cleveland Metroparks zoos have such exhibits.  If you get a chance to try it, take the kids. :)

Here are a few pics from our adventures at Nashville zoo with my niece and nephew, and the rainbow birds.

Scritches

Say hello to my muse.  This is Clio, my Senegal parrot.  She lives in my studio (well away from paint and fumes).  It's spring, which means she has itchy pinfeathers on her head.  When a new feather comes in, it's encased in keratin which the bird preens off with its beak.  Only thing is, they can't reach their own heads, so they generally use the buddy system and preen them for each other. 

Problem is, Clio's a single girl, so my much less efficient fingernails have to suffice for her.  She tells me she needs her head scratched by putting her foot up to her head and making scritching motions.  She's not much of a talker, her only word is "Up," (what I tell her when I want her to get on my hand), but she does a masterful imitation of the microwave, and me laughing, and smoochy noises.

Not much time to paint today but I squeezed an hour in, which felt good because I've hardly gotten any time to paint at all this week.  So I worked on knife-painting (impasto) my Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus).  I think his eye is a little too far back so I may have to fix that.

That said, it was a ton of fun painting all those little headfeathers that Clio likes me to scratch for her so much!  Knife painting is all about the texture and birdy heads have plenty of it.  The only thing I'm concerned about is I don't think I have an appropriately shaped knife for the feathers lower down.... I need something kind of shaped like a fan brush.  Not sure such a thing exists... hmmm.

More about lorikeets next time!

Minus the Rainbow

It's amazing how much better I'm in the Flow when I paint every day.

This past week has been horrendous.  My son Brandon's car blew a head gasket a week and a half ago, so I've been driving him to college and to work.  Then, my husband's car broke down last week... so I've basically been playing bus driver and getting everyone where they need to go, and squeezing in my day job, which has been leaving me NO time to paint. 

They're both off today, which means I have been really excited that I'd get some studio time, but I woke up without the slightest clue what I wanted to do, other than I wanted to paint a bird . I wasn't sure if I wanted to use a brush or knife, and I wasn't sure what kind of bird I wanted to paint.  Then I thought I'd work on my landscape, changed my mind about that, and finally settled on a really big knife painting of a rainbow lorikeet, since I've been working a lot in dark colors and I thought it might be fun to do something bright and feather-textured.

So, I worked on the background and more detail-necessary parts of this little guy.  I dunno, he's sort of looking more like an Indian Ringneck parakeet than a Lori to me, at least for the moment, but I'm sure that'll change when he gets his coat of many colors.

I love parrots.  I had budgies when I was a kid, and a mischievous lovebird named Gizmo who enjoyed escaping her cage while I was at school and flinging everything off my dresser and then running to hte edge to watch where it fell.  She also would fly up to the ceiling fan (which was always off unless she was securely locked in) and land on it, and the momentum of her landing would push the blades a little bit and she'd go for a ride.  Since then, I've had a Noble macaw, a couple of parrotlets, cockatiels and lovebirds, and currently a Senegal parrot who is just a sweetheart and really enjoys it when I spend time in the studio (where she lives... well away from access to paint, and fumes).  Cleveland Metroparks Zoo and Nashville zoo have lorikeet exhibits where you can go into their habitat and feed them nectar... they are such colorful little clowns.

Anyway, here's stage one on this guy... and it's a big canvas, 18 x 24, same size as my flamenco dancer.  I'm not sure I'm going to knife in the background at all, I kind of like the way it is.

Hopefully I'll get some time to finish him tomorrow, or at least make a dent!

Mini Paintings

I got the awesome news yesterday that my friend from high school, Monica, is stopping by to visit on her way from an archaeological dig in Arkansas back home to Cleveland, and staying a few days.  I'm so excited to see her, it's been 20 years!

BUT... that means it's likely I won't get time to paint Tuesday or Wednesday next week, so I want to get a couple ahead.  As a result I worked on some small paintings in oil today.

I love minis and ACEOs because it's an affordable way for anyone to collect miniature original works of art.  If you'd like to purchase any of these, check out the ACEO/Mini Page.

Stop and Smell the Daisies, 3 x 3 mini canvas

I roughed Stop and Smell the Daisies in ages ago, and then misplaced it in all the confusion of my son moving out for college, back home, then away again, and then back home again.  I found it this past weekend and put some more details on it, but it's not done yet... close, but not quite.

Joy and Friendship, 3 x 3 mini canvas. Click picture to purchase.

This one, however, I started and finished today.  I left the charcoal outlines in it a bit because I decided I like them.  This is a 3 x 3 on a mini canvas.

What Cheer? 2.5 x 3.5 oil on ACEO card, for sale here 

And I roughed in this little oil ACEO at the beginning of the month and got around to finishing it today.  I was trying to remember what the birdwatcher people say the cardinal says (they have words to match the calls of a lot of birds, which is why Chickadees are named chickadee-dee-dee), and I looked it up.  What cheer, cheer, cheer?  And then as I started to type this paragraph I realized I was hearing a cardinal outside my window.

I love these little guys... they sure brighten up a dreary winter.  I was washing dishes this morning and Mrs. Cardinal paid a visit to my garden, which is right outside my kitchen window. 

I have a fascination with painting birds lately... and I just got a book on painting wildlife, so expect to see more of them :)

Flaxen-Haired Girl

They say it takes 30 days for a habit to become ingrained.  I've been painting every day for about that long now, and I feel pretty good because this morning my day-job (medical transcription) boss called and asked could I get a file done STAT, so, I didn't get to do my morning journal-meditate-paint routine.  Still, I got the work done and went to the studio.  It's cool that it's becoming part of my day.

I thought I'd do some little ACEO sized paintings, playing with my new watercolor skills.  It didn't exactly work out that way.  The ACEO "watercolor" paper SUCKS for watercolors.  Literally.  It sucks up the paint instantly which means you can't work with the wet to blend much at all. 

I persevered anyway and came up with this cartoony-looking pony that is absolutely unlike anything I've ever done before (I am not that great with a line, so I tend to erase a lot when drawing).  Still, I'm kind of intrigued by the little thing.  It's definitely not perfect but I think, with better paper and practice, I could get the hang of this.  I'd be way better off cutting up the 5 x 7 Stratford 140 lb paper I was working with yesterday than trying to work with these awful little cards.  Maybe they'll be good for something else.  Markers?  I dunno.  Colored pencil maybel

For my next trick I tried a little blue and gold macaw ACEO.  I paint horses better than most things because I have been obsessed with them since I could recognize one in a picture and when I was a kid that was pretty much all I drew.  Birds, I haven't drawn or painted so much, but I do love birds.  I have a little Senegal parrot I intend to try to paint from life at some point. 

For a long time I was a veterinary technician at a clinic that saw small animals and exotics, so I got to work with birds a LOT.  Holding them for a veterinary exam is a challenge sometimes! -- especially macaws like this one, which are a lot of bird to handle and when they aren't happy they are ear-splittingly vocal.  Anyway, I had fun with this one, because they are such cool birds that I've spent time admiring them in detail... the little black mask of feather tufts on their faces, their wrinkly skin around their beaks, and their glorious, glorious feathers.  I have never owned a big, big macaw but my first parrot (not counting little cockatiels, parakeets and lovebirds) was a "mini" macaw (a Hahn's macaw) named Simon.  One of these days I want to paint one of these beautiful birds in vibrant oils, too.