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
Perched
While the weather is frightfully cold and icy, I’m content to perch at my desk to paint. And speaking of perched, I’m having a great time teaching Birds and Words online at Winslow Art Center. Participants have been hard at work practicing lettering, layouts, and different ways to put birds together with words, quotes, and poems. This week we worked on perching birds on letters—a fun way to shine the spotlight on our avian neighbors and record what birds are hanging out and surviving the cold this February. Tips & Techniques– Watercolor… Read More
Acrobats in the Freezing Wind
I remember the first time I saw a starling, now at least 35 years ago. I was in a bank parking lot and a small flock was strutting and pecking around on the lawn. I thought they were such extraordinary birds—as Mary Oliver writes, “chunky and noisy but with stars in their black feathers”—and I excitedly went home to look up my find. When I discovered they were ordinary European starlings, I felt foolish. If I was going to get to know birds, I was going to have to do better. Now… Read More
From the Collection
I’m taking advantage of bitterly cold days to paint a few bird nests that I’ve wanted to spend time with from the collection of the New York State Museum in Albany. Maybe that seems like an odd thing—spending time with a bird nest—but I find that when I am doing a detailed drawing and painting like this, I can’t help but think about the bird that made it, the young that fledged from it, the materials it is made of, the weather it survived, and the person who collected it. In this… Read More
Drawn In 