Warblers in my Sketchbook
Spring is here! Well, not really. It will be a few weeks before things start to green up and another six or seven weeks before the warblers show up in New York. In the meantime, it’s 40°F, raining, and gray, and the only warblers I’ll be seeing for a while are the ones in my sketchbook. Tips and Techniques– You can see from my color notes that I used very few pigments to paint each of these birds. When choosing colors for a subject, experiment with a few mixes and see if… Read More
Not Quite Yet
Eventually, our desire for spring will match the reality outside. But not quite yet. I welcome the incremental increase in daylight and the occasional temperature over 40F, but I don’t let a warm day or two fool me. While I await spears of skunk cabbage to emerge from the snowpack, I’m also gearing up for my upcoming online class, Warblers in Watercolor. The class is intended to be a pre‑season warmup for the arrival of these delightful and elusive songbirds come May. Like spring itself, warblers arrive on their own terms. They… Read More
Pre-Flight Checklist
Sketches. Maps. Curiosity. These travel essentials are just as important to me as airline tickets and a passport. These pages are part of my preparation for a workshop I’ll be teaching at Sofia in Monsaraz, Portugal, June 3–8, 2026. This region of Portugal is a landscape of wide skies, ancient olive trees, cork oaks, vineyards, white-walled towns, and birds I hope to see. I’ve never been to Portugal, so my preparation also includes brushing up on Portuguese history, reading a few poets; studying the work of Portuguese artists; and learning about the… Read More
Unexpected Connections
A sudden flash of white-and-black wings lifts from the roadside and then vanishes just as quickly into the field. Only one bird shows so much white in winter: the snow bunting. In good years, I spot them at the edges of nearby agricultural fields where they forage for seeds. Snow buntings are birds of the high Arctic that come south to the northern U.S. and Canada in winter. After painting these birds, I went looking for images of their eggs to add to the page. I was delighted to discover a nest… Read More
Silver Lining
The silver lining of the past week’s snow and cold is the flock of juncos that are hanging out on our back porch every day. We put up an extra bird feeder there to help them through the freezing weather and heavy snow. Unfortunately, my perch for sketching by our back porch door has proven rather drafty— the birds are surviving the chill far better than I am. Sketched in pencil in a Handbook Journal Co. sketchbook with 140lb cold press watercolor paper, Micron 005 black pen for the text, and watercolors-… Read More
Grateful
Sending you good wishes, a bit of November beauty, and gratitude on this Thanksgiving holiday! I’m grateful to you for taking time in your life for art and for your kind “likes” and comments on my posts. It’s a strange thing to send my sketchbook pages out into the world each week and not really know where they go. I’m grateful to those of you who I’ve met in person or online who thank me for being on the receiving end. I’m also grateful for the wonderful artists who take my classes— I love… Read More
Front and Center
I have several half-finished flower paintings in my sketchbook and allium in bloom that’s calling me from the garden. A Louisiana waterthrush is singing to beat the band by the streamside and a blue-winged warbler just showed up in the thicket by the woods, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to capture them—yet. I just wrapped up teaching The Art of the Bird, so nests have been very much front and center on my desk. At risk of seeming single-minded, I hope you’ll indulge me with another nest posting before… Read More
A Lovely Beginning
I found four bluebird eggs in a carefully woven nest of fine grasses in our nestbox today. I suspect that there will be five tomorrow, and then the female will begin to incubate them. Waiting until a full clutch is laid ensures that the young birds hatch, grow, and fledge together. Most of the other songbirds that nest here are just getting started or are yet to return. New songs fill the blossoming woods and fields each day – what a lovely beginning for the new season. Tips & Techniques- When painting… Read More
Lasting Construction
The Eastern Towhee is a bird of forest edges and shrubby fields where they scratch around on the ground for seeds, fruits, grains, and insects. I see them occasionally foraging under our shrubs and I hear them frequently in spring and summer calling from the brushy field bordering our property. What I’ll never see is their nest in the wild, which is always well concealed on the ground. Hence, I put the towhee on my short list of nests to pull from the shelves when I visited the NYS Museum ornithology collection… Read More
Get Sketching!
It’s that time of year when I’m eager to put pen to paper, but cold, gray days dampen my enthusiasm for going outside. It’s the perfect time for my annual pilgrimage to the Pember Museum of Natural History in Granville, NY. Open just a few hours on Saturdays, I arrive and get to work quickly. There are so many choices amidst the wealth of specimens, but I’m always drawn first to the nests and eggs. From there, I branch out to birds and insects. I focus intently, keep my pen moving, and… Read More
Drawn In 