Mood Adjusting Wild Turkey

It's impossible to sketch this face without smiling!
Yesterday, I plugged away at my taxes, not an activity my personality is well suited for. The previous night I created the pencil sketch for this art in my sketch book. It waited for me patiently on the kitchen table while I took on the less savory task. I could take breaks, work on the sketch a bit, feel refreshed and go back to my tax work. For the creative spirit, this is like an oasis in a desert. I will share turkey photos and tell you all about my visits with these funny creatures soon. But for the moment, I just wanted to share the fun they've brought me.

No matter how you're feeling when you begin, there is no way to hold onto a grumpy mood while you're sketching a turkey's face! And if it's the last thing you do before going to bed at night, you're certain to fall asleep smiling.

The Secret Lives of Ducks

Head-bobbing is a delightful nuptial display to witness. Two Blue-winged Teals are pictured below, the female on the left with her neck contracted, the male on the right with his neck stretched, alternating these movements in perfect rhythm. (Click images to enlarge).An instant later, the male stepped onto the female's back and she disappeared. It doesn't take a rocket-scientist to figure out what's happening here. "She's going to drown!" I heard myself say. Then came the quiet response from local naturalist, Charlie Corbeil, "Maybe she can hold her breath." Hummm. "Maybe...." I had to laugh at myself. The whole sequence spanned less than 60 seconds and was followed by the female's energetic bathing, wing-flapping and preening.Thus began my not-so-subtle introduction to the secret lives of ducks, one of several close-up encounters at Viera Wetlands with Charlie Corbeil, Master Naturalist and photographer. Then followed my field workshop with the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival two days later. Other than general recognition, I knew zero about ducks prior to my experiences in Brevard County, making it a special treat to view them along side experts.

Here we are, below, in the Space Coast Festival's field workshop, the "Secret Life of Ducks", on Black Point Wildlife Drive, Merritt Island NWR, ready to see some ducks.
And below is what we found--thousands of ducks along with an enormous collection of foraging wading birds (only partially represented in the photo), among them, an Eurasian Wigeon, Roseate Spoonbills, and my first look at American Avocets.
Our patient and knowledgeable instructors on this field adventure are pictured below, Bruce Anderson, front scope, and Murray Gardler, just behind and slightly forward, both delightful in their leadership, their enthusiasm and their patience.
Seeing a duck through a scope is not always easy. They move. And sometimes they disappear before you have a chance to spot them. And when they're resting and preening they are often in groups, meaning you have to sort through ducks to find the field marks for the one you're searching for. But what a triumph when you succeed. Not only is the 'whole world' waiting, but they celebrate with you--you, your duck-spotting buddies and two genuinely enthusiastic instructors, all of which made for a warm and gratifying experience.
Blue-winged Teal sketch in progress

I learned tons of interesting facts about ducks, too many to absorb all at once. But I will share one duck life secret with you. Have you ever considered how all those ducklings in a brood happen to hatch out at the same time so they can swim along with mom? The female lays her eggs over a period of days, but she doesn't begin incubation until every egg is laid. Hatch timing is determined by the number of days incubated rather than the date the egg is laid. Smart ducks!The top series of images were taken at the Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands in Brevard County, Florida, with guide, photographer and Master Naturalist, Charlie Corbeil. Click the link and visit Charlie's beautiful photography.
Also visit the website of Master Naturalist, and photographer, Vince Lamb. Vince and Charlie were two of my guides while visiting Brevard County's beautiful places and wildlife during my January visit.
Visit Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival and mark the 2011 dates on your calendar.
And David McCree's festival reports at Blog the Beach will give you interesting information about the 2010 festival activities.
Also visit Space Coast Eco for informative descriptions of key natural areas and field trips for your visit to Brevard County. These excellent field trip posts are created by my Brevard County hostess, Marge Bell. You will also want to visit Space Coast Beach Buzz and FloridaBeachBasics for more visitor and wildlife information.
To view all my posts about Brevard County's Space Coast Birds and the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, click here.

Linked to Bird Photography Weekly #78, at Birdfreak.com to celebrate the conservation of our world's birds.

A New Blog on the Block--Sketching in Nature

My neighborhood blogging block, of course, is Nature Blog Network. And Sketching in Nature is the new blog, an international group blog created by artist, author and teacher, Cathy Johnson, also known as Kate.

I am delighted to be a contributing artist in this group and look forward to seeing how other artists work. It's a chance for everyone to peek over the shoulders of nature-loving artists and see what they discover, what draws their interest and what inspires them to create.

In my last post, I featured the male downy woodpecker that visited me while I was sketching an oak tree. I was also visited by a brown thrasher who graced me with song. There is a wonderful world out there to see and hear.
Below is the finished sketch.
To see another view and read more, click here. And do pay a visit to Sketching in Nature and linger for a while. Everyone's art is different. That's what makes it so much fun!

Purple Finches and the Great Backyard Bird Count

I mentioned in my anniversary post how much blogging has not only been a place to create, but an inspiration. And that inspiration is often provided by my fellow bloggers.

Round Robin caught my eye this week with Hugh's post on the Great Backyard Bird Count. Then I noticed how many other bloggers were participating. So I read about it and decided to count too. My first day, I felt hesitation, mainly about busy birds that won't keep still while you try to count them. But this nervousness quickly fades. You just do the best you can and go! And even if you are a beginner like me, there's a primer on ebird that will jump start your understanding of how this thing we call "counting" really works.

Nancy at the Zen Birdfeeder posted her bird count yesterday with some nice information about pine siskins. She also posted two convenient links to the Cornell site with helpful information. I visited the links and explored the "Top Ten" and guess what! At the time I'm writing this post, Knoxville, TN ranks #5 in "Localities Submitting the Most Checklists". Do you think that makes me glad I decided to participate? What a fun surprise!

Today I also took a few minutes to sketch and paint the male and female purple finches in my sketch book (the ones that aren't showing up for the count). The female was a joy to draw. I sketched her several days ago. But the male has been a different experience!
Actually, my first try looks like a pretty close sketch as I post it here. But remember in my last post I referred to "finch shapes" and how the eye integrates shapes with practice? Well, I grew up on a farm and we had roosters. Every time I walked away from this sketch and came back to look at it again, that finch face turned into a rooster! And that just wouldn't do.

I realized there were two shapes battling for my attention, the shape of his head and the shape of those fluffed up feathers. So I erased the top lines and concentrated on the shape of his face without the fluffed up feathers.
And then I added the shading for the fluffed feathers and adjusted some lines in his bill.


Still not perfect, but I stopped seeing a rooster. By this time my sketch paper is getting pretty worn and my doubting voice is starting to taunt me, "how do you think you're going to sketch in the field with all this erasing?" And since I have to have the last word, I answered. "Practice...and patience. Besides, I'll start with a plant."

Inauguration Chickadee

No sooner did I see my photos of this Carolina chickadee in the snow than I began to think about painting it. Since I haven't painted snow in a while, I decided to try it first in my sketch book. Sketching is fun because its relaxed. Generally used for recording experiences, artist notes and sometimes the planning out of a painting, a sketchbook is a place for 'no pressure' practice and play. It's a doubly worthwhile experience to take photos as the sketch progresses. I'm discovering this as I remind myself to do it. You get to see what's happening twice, once while you are deep in your creative brain, wandering the uncharted territory of color, shape and perspective as it relates to a new subject. And a second time as you see the progression through images.

While viewing the image on the left above I could clearly see the pathways of dark and light and how they weren't leading my eye through the sketch. And since this sketch is a bit of a map for a future painting, I went back in and added the darks you see on the right and in the final sketch (top). Generally, I like to begin with the background when I start a painting, to see how the colors and light play out. Then I work with the painting focus to make sure these same colors are reflected in the subject.

This is a painting of neutrals with a splash of color, an arrangement I love. I used ultramarine blue, vandyke brown and sepia to make variations of gray and brown. I added quinacridone gold to the blue to create greens and Winsor Deep Red for the berries.
In the end the sketch was wonderful practice. I noticed and corrected details in the placement of the eye, the shape of the beak, the shape of the white feather pattern against the black cap. I also noticed snow. It's crusty and irregular. I lost my snow shapes easily. So, with my sketch to remind me, I'll draw the snow detail more carefully in the final painting.
Inauguration day. New hope and new energy for the world.

A Beach-y Day

When I opened the window this morning, while sipping coffee, I had the sensation I was at the beach. Unlike many other parts of the country, our weather in the TN valley has slipped back into moderate temperatures, 60's (F) in the day and 40's at night.
For the past three days we've been deluged with rain, soaking rain. But on this overcast day the wind took center stage, ebbing and flowing, sometimes whispering for an instant, then roaring through the tree limbs like an ocean tide. You can feel the air changing. We have colder temps promised and snow in the forecast, so I went out to get some bird feeding supplies. More on that later.It was also a perfect morning to play with paints. Over the past week, I have sketched the golden-crowned kinglet that I photographed in my yard. The nice thing about drawing is you don't have to have a perfect image, just a good reference for shapes and habitat. And while I sketched, I rediscovered how much I enjoy drawing. I forget sometimes when I'm away from it and then I reconnect with what keeps me coming back to it over and over again.
I used my sketchbook to get an idea of the values and colors I wanted to use, to see where I want to place the darks and lights. I tried different mixes of colors, too, so that when I begin on my watercolor paper, I'm warmed up and have a better idea of where I'm going. This is a second sketch of the kinglet on watercolor paper taped to a backboard and ready to paint.

Sketching Practice

When I go to visit my favorite art instructor in New York, Ann K. Lindsay, I am reminded of how actively my "critical mind" comments on my painting efforts. It makes me sigh sometimes, wondering if this will ever lessen. Ann says its always with us. And then I am reminded to "be kind," to step back and allow those critical thoughts and especially fears to subside. No effort is wasted. Our minds are learning, integrating, even when we think we're doing nothing.

For many of us, being kind to others is second nature. But thinking kindly about our own efforts, our practice before we get it right, doesn't come so easily. On a practical level, this critical thinking helps us fit in and strengthens our ability to cooperate in our families and community.But we also have our own perspective, an inner voice that allows for individual differences, our own uniqueness. And eventually we come to respect both the uniqueness in ourselves and in others. It is one of the joys of art classes. After a work session, we post our efforts on the wall and talk about what was hard and what we enjoyed, what we did and did not like about the effort. And when I look at everyone's work, it is wonderful, fresh and alive with discovery and uniqueness. When I am too busy with other things to practice drawing and painting, I come back to it with timidity. And that means my critical mind (which also seeks to protect me) is in high gear and shouting, "don't risk showing that to anyone." And so it was when I posted my first kinglet sketch.

I also stepped away from it leaving the sketch visible on my table until my opinions softened. I have since had time to create a few more sketches. And I learned that drawing a robin is much easier for me than a kinglet. The reason? I think its because angular shapes give my eye something to grab and work from. Angles break up the shapes. I sketched this robin in only a few minutes and was pleased with the first effort even though the legs are a bit short. The ease of this sketch could be from having seen many robins, even though this is my first attempt to draw one. But it also could be that sketching the kinglet warmed me up and quieted my doubt. Probably all of the above!
Critical thinking and seeing work together as we draw, paint, live life. Sprinkle in a little kindness as you practice and watch what happens.

Coming up: My Thanksgiving visitor and the painting

Travel Sketchbook--Taos Pueblo

It happened that I visited the Taos Pueblo on the day of their Corn Festival. Respect for tradition and the spiritual nature of the ceremony required that no cameras, sketching or recordings be allowed while visiting on this day. What you see here are sketches that were created after I returned to my hotel.

This was a new experience, the reliance on visual memory rather than reference photos. The detail stored is attached to what was most impressive or enjoyed. For me it was the drum beat, the native language, the women’s costumes, especially their boots and hair, the blankets the men wore over one shoulder and the overall reverence for ritual and tradition.

Only some of this can be rendered visually, but the images created hold the essence of the experience and bring to mind what matters. When I look at these sketches, I also recall what is not depicted, the two young German boys, ages four and six, who sat near me on a log bench in the courtyard as we awaited the ceremony. They had just moved to the states with their parents. A large thunder cloud darkened the sky and big, cold rain drops began to fall. The parents walked over to a shelter to avoid the rain, but the boys and I remained on the bench. I opened a small umbrella, anticipating a sudden down pour as the cloud moved overhead. But no sooner had I opened it, than the gusting wind flipped it inside out. As I struggled against the wind to correct this, I looked at the boys who were now staring at me, and muttered something silly like, “a lot of help this umbrella is.” The older boy laughed and turned to his brother to interpret. The younger child collapsed into contagious giggles and the three of us giggled together while the wind blew rain in our faces. Watching from a distance, their father laughed, too.

I was struck by the warmth of this moment, the comfortable sense of connection that lept over barriers of strangeness, language and culture and united us all in the intimacy of shared laughter. Laughter is such a powerful energy. It, too, lives on in these sketches.

New Mexico Travel Sketchbook

My recent trip to New Mexico was pimarily focused on writing, but I also spent some time enjoying the area history and culture. Sketching is a fun way to slow things down and experience more deeply. The Inn on the Santa Fe trail is located in Las Vegas, NM, an area of high desert at the foothills of the Sangre de Criso Mountains. Below, an old wagon on display in the central courtyard at the Inn. The Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge was located near by, a plateau where the Sangre de Cristo mountains meet the Great Plains. Here I saw prairie falcons, red-tailed hawks, ravens, yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds and western kingbirds along with many prairie grasses and wildflowers. Detail below of Hermits Peak in the distance.Below, a larger view of prairie marsh with bull thistles in the foreground. I must say that the prairie grasses here were unexpectedly beautiful, a sea of blue-green waving pale yellow seed heads in the breeze.