Day of the Wigeons - Holiday of the Ducks

I looked forward to this long weekend because I hoped to be able to devote a fair amount of time to it to art. After my unsuccessful Northern Shoveler watercolors I decided I needed to spend some time doing detailed sketches of ducks. So yesterday I concentrated on Northern Shovelers. Today it was American Wigeons.

For many ducks can be dull birds. When we were at The Meadows of Cape May in October we ran into someone who was using the trails for bike riding. He had no interest in birds at all. Until we showed him some ducks magnified 30x in my spotting scope. I think he left a believer. Ducks are incredibly beautiful birds, especially in breeding plumage. The one problem for an artist is that the patterns can be so complex that to render them truthfully seems almost impossible. Thus these drawings. My hope is that in doing them enough I'll eventually understand both the structure of ducks, especially in regard to feather tracts, and find a shorthand for their complex patterns.

Today's works like yesterday's are all based on photos that I took. With such beautiful birds it's been a pleasure to work on them. At some time, probably weeks away, I'll try to do some more developed works using ducks as subject matter.

Duck Sketches

My recent watercolors of Northern Shovelers left me disappointed. I realized that part of this might have been due to the fact that I really don't know ducks all that well, either through seeing them or through drawing them. Sometimes when that happens I have a tendency to just go ahead and paint them anyway trusting that some magical powers of the brush coupled with my past artistic experience will pull off the little trick of making it look like I know what I'm about.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It didn't with those two watercolors so I decided to devote some time to doing detailed sketches of ducks. My hope was that it would improve my knowledge of ducks. Today's results are above. All are based on photos I took. They include the same Northern Shoveler from the watercolors in both sketches. Also included are two Wood Ducks seen at the Wissahickon in Philadelphia a couple of years ago and a Blue-Winged Teal seen at Horicon Marsh this fall.

As I've said many, probably too many times, I don't like working from photos. But as Colleen C. said recently on bird forum: better photos than dead birds as older artists used to use. Before binoculars, telescopes and cameras the only way to see the details of most birds was to have dead specimens. Looked at from that perspective it doesn't see all that bad.

But photos are always deceptive. No one actually sees as a camera does. We see much more dynamically and our other senses at the scene contribute to the overall visual impression. Photos don't have this. So they are useful for studying detail at times, especially in the colder months of the year when it's harder to work outside, but I'd be a lot happier to be drawing them as I looked at them in my scope. Next spring, or hopefully earlier.

Happy Thanksgiving 2009!

What could be a better image of the pleasures of Thanksgiving and the vibrant colors of fall, not yet dulled down to the grays of winter, than this Jolly Jester Marigold from our garden?
Normally it would be blasted by Thanksgiving but this is the first year in many where it's Thanksgiving and we still haven't had a killing frost.

When we do get a killing frost though these Red Russian Kale should still be just fine, snugged away in their cold frame (as long as I build a top for it soon!).

Meanwhile during this 4-day holiday I'll see if I can't come up with a better version of this Northern Shoveler seen at Horicon Marsh in September, 2009. I keep getting lost in the complex feather pattern and my 15-30 minute watercolor turn to 60 minute muddycolors. I wasn't going to post these but I hate to post just photos. They look so empty to me compared to actual artwork!
Watercolors really look best when they're crisp. These aren't but it remains my goal.

Happy Thanksgiving! A great day to realize all that you have to be thankful for!

Multi-pronged Attack

Since last weekend's attempt to meld detailed drawings and quick watercolors I've concentrated on quick watercolors. I like them. They're fun to do and because they are quick my standards aren't as high. But I often want to take what I've learned from them and use it on a more developed watercolor.

Today I decided to first do a fairly quick watercolor of a Lesser Yellowlegs and Solitary Sandpiper seen at Crane Creek in Ohio. I intended to then do a more developed watercolor like last week.

Something went wrong. I ended up spending an hour or more doing a watercolor on paper that could never handle that much working. I'm not sure how it went so wrong but I decided it might be best to do a detailed drawing before proceeding to a more developed watercolor.

But this time I decided to use my watercolor pencils. Now they've always been very frustrating to me. I thought that wouldn't be the case today because I didn't intend to use water with them. But they were still frustrating. There's something about the physical quality of the pigment that makes it very recalcitrant about accepting additional layers of color, with or without water. So the results are at top. Basically the first color down is what you see, regardless of my intent for it to be otherwise.

So a beautiful day for sitting in the sun working on new drawings and paintings has gone awry. But progress in art is rarely straightforward.

Time to go do some garden work while we're still enjoying this abnormally warm November weather. Maybe these will look better when I come back. Ummmmmmmmmm then again maybe not.

Snow Geese

About a month ago I posted something on sketching the natural wealth of Cape May, NJ. It included a lot of live field sketches of birds seen around Cape May, including the wonderful Brigantine NWR about 50 miles north. When you're done visiting and tally up all that you've seen you almost always end with: Boy I saw a lot of different types of birds!

One of those birds is the Snow Goose, a bird we primarily see at Brigantine. Often we only see large flocks in flight, but this time we were lucky enough to also see some in the water and relatively close.

This watercolor is another in the series of recent quick watercolors. It took 15-30 minutes and is loosely based on a photo I took. If I wanted to get every bit of beauty, and detail, that is in a Snow Goose I'd be disappointed. Of course if I wanted that I wouldn't have tried such a quick watercolor on barely adequate paper. I am happy with this for other reasons: the main one being that I think it does create the illusion of Snow Geese in water.

Sometimes that is the most basic pleasure of art: illusion. With materials that may be primitive, sophisticated or somewhere in between you make marks on flat paper that somehow transform themselves into an illusion of the three dimensional world. I think this does that. What it doesn't do and what I have absolutely no interest in is create the illusion of a photograph.

If there is one thing more than any other that has made my shy away from doing wildlife art it's the prevalence of art that imitates photos but not nature. There is a big difference, though I think many people including many artists don't realize it. For me there will always be far greater pleasure in creating an illusion of nature, no matter how basic, than an illusion of a photo, no matter how detailed. Of course not all detailed art models itself on photos, for instance Durer and his hare. But much does and to me it is antagonistic to the vitality of nature. But it does sell and this may be why more artists work this way than would really like to.

This is also part of my recent training exercise of short watercolors. The purpose of that is to just get me feeling more free with watercolor so that I don't do tight, crabbed work. At some point it should lead to works that are more developed and more detailed. For now though I'm enjoying the quickly created illusion.

Paint With a Brush?

Trick title right? Of course you paint with a brush. Well maybe; but one of the things that bothered me about the painting in my last post of the Lesser Yellowlegs and the lily pads was that it was a little too close to paint by number. I first drew in all the shapes and then colored them in. There was very little variety in types of brushstroke. In fact you could barely see any brushstrokes.

So in a brief 15-20 minutes last night and another this morning I decided to experiment with two watercolors that were done only with a brush, including the preliminary drawing.

They are Savannah Sparrows, seen at Brigantine NWR in October of 2009. They are based on photos I took. My intent was to try to force myself to use the brush more creatively, to take advantage of all it could do, and not just use it to color in shapes.

To a large extent I did that with the sparrows, though I did lose a lot of the detail that I'd hoped to show. But I didn't do it at all with the background. I think I should have gone for a bit more detail there and not so much impressionistic washes.

Still I'm happy with them. I think it's a start in the right direction, at least for me, with watercolor. If you paint the preliminary sketch with a brush it's a much easier transition to also using the brush for shape. It's a very natural flow.

I have to add that I also wanted to try this very beautiful sparrow, as so many of them are. But the detail always scared me off. For some reason knowing that I'd do it with a brush, and therefore just couldn't get too lost in detail, made it seem less intimidating.

Subduction in Art

A few posts ago I mentioned that I'd already gone through too many tortured metaphors and wasn't going to add one more: subduction. Subduction is the geological process where one plate slides under another. But what slides under eventually reappears in some way, generally volcanic. This is a rough generalization so don't go taking any geology tests based on my amateurish summary.

But it does strike me as appropriate to art. Much goes into the artist's wealth of experience and out it comes in some metamorphosed form. I mention this because I've done a lot of detailed pencil sketches recently as well as some very short and blunt watercolors.

The newest watercolor of a Lesser Yellowlegs tries to blend these two together. I'm not sure if it's done and still need to look at it some more. My intent in it was to have some of the detail and realism of the skecthes while also making it a lively watercolor painting.

I'm happy with it in many ways but also know all the parts that I'm dissatisfied with. I still need to decide whether to go back into it or to just spend that energy on a new painting.

I'm also including a few examples of different stages in the painting, going from the very earliest to the next to last.