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
Hidden in Plain Sight
Most birds protect and conceal their eggs in carefully constructed nests, in tree cavities or underground burrows, or high on rocky ledges and sea cliffs. Not so with terns. These seabirds nest together in colonies and lay their eggs right on the ground on small islands and stony beaches. Terns make just a small scrape on the ground and the females add beach debris or dead vegetation, shell fragments, or stones to provide some camouflage. The beauty and success of this strategy lies with the eggs and chicks themselves, whose markings blend… Read More
Two Terns
Out of the fog the terns come calling. I hear their chatter over the waves before I see them, and then, there they are, rapid wing beats passing overhead. More emerge from the mist. They hover over the water and then fall from the sky, striking small fish below the surface. As luck would have it, I’m at Gooseberry Neck this morning, a small spit of an island in southern Massachusetts that attracts seabirds, shorebirds, and songbirds to its open water, rocky beaches, and shrubby interior. I’m grateful to be in the… Read More
International Guillemot Appreciation Day
IGAD! It’s a big day for guillemots. If these small seabirds only knew that there are people around the world championing them today! Would they puff out their chests with pride, flash their white wing patches, or wave their bright red feet in the air? Or, perhaps, unassuming as they are, they would go about their usual seabird business, diving for fish, cruising the waves, tending their young. This auspicious day was begun some 32 years ago by a group of seabird researchers in Maine. Noting the lack of attention paid the… Read More
Seabirds Up Close
I’ve spent many summers watching seabirds from the deck of the Maine State Ferry, on boat tours to the Atlantic Puffin colony on Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock and, more recently, on Iceland’s rocky cliffsides. From common sightings, like gulls and terns, to more unusual ones, like storm petrels skimming close to the surface or gannets plunge diving into the water, it’s always a thrill to see what’s out there. The Double-crested Cormorant is a common bird to watch for. It’s is easy to spot from its characteristic behaviors: sitting low in the… Read More
Answering the Call
When poppies bloom, you can’t wait. You can’t say: I’ll paint them next week, or even tomorrow. By next week, they may be gone. Tomorrow it may be raining. You have to set aside the vacuum, the groceries, the weeds that need pulling. You must go out and paint. Tips and Techniques– If you are unsure of which colors to choose for a particular subject, do some color tests. This can be invaluable for deciding which pigments will work best before you are committed to your painting. I tested a lot of… Read More
Renewal
It’s the season of waiting here in New York: waiting for warmth, waiting for blossoms, waiting for green, waiting for birds to return. But it’s the season of renewal, too, as spring unfolds with song, color, and light. I’m celebrating Earth’s turning toward the sun with this tree swallow nest and the promise of eggs and new life. Wishing you the same. I’m excited to be sharing techniques for sketching nests and other nature subjects during Botanical Art & Nature Sketching Retreat. This weekend workshop takes place Nov. 8-11 in New York’s… Read More
It’s Complicated
Consider the brittle star – a simple marine creature comprised of a central disk with five arms extending outward to gather bits of food. Now multiply each arm by two, and two again, and again, and again…and you have a magnificent basket star. I saw this one, Gorgoncephalus eucnemis, on my recent visit to Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Benthic Invertebrate Collection in La Jolla, California, and I was entranced. These creatures live in deeper ocean waters so, unless I take up scuba diving, I will never see one alive. I think it… Read More
Out of the Depths
Row after row, jar after jar: 55,000 containers representing 800,000 specimens and 7,600 species from the world’s oceans lay in front of me. Like a kid in a candy store, I had to choose. Giant crabs, exquisite sea stars, ghostly squid, mollusk shells of all sizes and stripes—these creatures without a backbone make up the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. On a recent trip to Southern California, I arranged to spend a few hours sketching there, and what an amazing opportunity it was. After roaming several rows of otherworldly… Read More
In Praise of Precision
It’s nearly mushroom season here in New York, the only time of year that I’m rooting for humidity and rain. I typically work fast to keep up with sketching the variety of mushrooms under our grove of oaks, but for now, I’m taking my time. There’s so much subtlety and beauty in the simple form of a mushroom. It’s a pleasure to look closely and capture it on paper. Tips and Techniques— I did this painting as a demo for my online Mushroom Explosion in Watercolor class using a photo I took… Read More
Drawn In 