Diving into Seaweed
How often have you walked along the seashore or a rocky beach and not given a second glance at one of the most important players in the ocean: seaweed. Seaweed, or marine algae, live in the marginal world between the tides and in deeper waters where sunlight still penetrates. Arguably, they are the key to life for the world’s oceans and the larger species that we notice and care about. But as an artist, the variety, color, and beauty of algae are just as fascinating.
Seaweeds are identified and grouped by the color of their reproductive spores: green, red/pink, and brown. The color of their fronds varies widely but derives from just a few pigments in their cells. Green algae have green pigments only. Brown algae can range in color from golden to olive to dark brown with just two pigments, green and brown. Red algae have red and blue pigments, as well as green, which gives this group an incredible color range from pink to maroon to purple.
The algae on this page come from herbarium collections. The oldest dates to the 1890s, a time when algae pressing was not only done for scientific study, but also as a popular artistic pursuit.
If you would like to take a deeper dive and paint algae with me this fall, check out my new online class series Collecting Nature in Ink and Watercolor starting Tuesday, 9/24 at Winslow Art Center. The series also includes sea stars, butterflies, and nests. Visit the Workshops page for additional fall classes.
Leap of Faith
With nesting season over and summer on the wane, birds have quietly started to leave us. Most go south, making incredible journeys across land and ocean. But others simply go out to sea, where they spend the winter riding the waves. The beloved Atlantic Puffin is one such seafarer. Along rugged coasts in the North Atlantic, young birds born just this year jump from islands and cliffs where they were reared and head out into the open ocean alone. Their parents do the same, spending the next eight months at sea. I love the thought of those young birds taking a leap of faith into unknown waters and living in that wild expanse of ocean in the months and years to come.
Tips & Techniques– This is the final painting in my Seabird Portrait series. The Atlantic Puffin joins the Northern Gannet, Common Tern, Black Guillemot, and Double-crested Cormorant. When doing a series, it’s helpful to carry some similar elements through each piece. It could be the text style, color palette, layout elements, or similar subject matter. As you can see, there are some variations here, but the series mostly hangs together. Have you ever done a series? What are your tips?
Coming up: I have new in person and online classes coming up this fall. I’d love you to join me!
Finally! Mushrooms
I’ve been waiting patiently for mushrooms to come. It’s been hot and humid. It rained. It was humid again. Perfect mushroom weather. Still, I waited. Mushrooms, it seems, have a mind of their own. Some years they come. Others, they don’t. One year there are twenty or more varieties. The next year ten. And then, finally, they appeared. I seized the moment and here’s the result.
Tips and Techniques– If you are a fungi enthusiast—or are intrigued to know more—I highly recommend Drawing and Painting Fungi, An artist’s guide to finding and illustrating mushrooms and lichens by Claire Kathleen Ward (Crowood Press, 2024) Ward’s book is not only amazingly comprehensive and incredibly beautiful, but also a joy to read. It’s illustrated with Ward’s detailed drawings and paintings, as well as artwork by others, including yours truly. I realize that makes me a biased reviewer, but believe me, this book is a triumph.
It never gets old
When bird nests are carefully preserved, they can last a long time. The ones you see here were constructed and collected at least 100 years ago. They eventually found their way into the ornithology collection of the New York State Museum in Albany, where they were carefully wrapped with cotton batting, boxed, and stored in metal cabinets. I was thrilled to get a peek inside recently and be allowed to take out several nests to photograph and sketch. I’ll use the photos in upcoming classes and projects, but seeing the real thing was a treasure. Like the subject itself, sketching nests just never gets old.
Fall Workshops– I’ve just listed several in person workshops for fall 2024. If you live near New York’s Capital Region or Massachusetts’ Berkshires, I’d love for you to join me. Plus, Winslow Art Center has just announced is lineup of travel workshops for 2025– I’ll be teaching one in Italy in October 2025. I’ll post a new online class through Winslow Art Center soon.
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 perfectly with their surroundings. Hidden in plain sight, you could easily walk right by– or on—them and never know it. Hence, the protective fencing on beaches where terns nest. This Common Tern hatched on an island in Maine monitored by the Audubon Seabird Institute and, to the best of my knowledge, is now out flying over the waves of the Atlantic.
Tips and Techniques- Patience is a virtue, but especially so when doing a piece like this. Walking away and coming back can help you see things more clearly when painting a complex subject. I worked on this for an hour or two at a time over several days, chipping away strand by strand. Each time I returned to it, I had a fresh perspective on what to tackle next. Even if you just leave a painting overnight, you’ll often see things you missed when you return to it or feel confident calling it done when you take another look.
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 wilder world of ocean and sky; grateful for terns, before the sun and the rest of the day breaks through.
I painted these two terns for my Seabird Portraits class, experimenting with different color palettes and layouts. I’d be curious to hear which you like better.
Vacation Sketching
I’m back from a week on the island of Vinalhaven, which lies 15 miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine. While I’m incredibly grateful for the time away, I’m also longing for more. My week was full of exploring tidal coves, hiking through moss carpeted spruce forests, swimming in the island’s former granite quarries, sinking into new books, and sketching. I could have easily kept going and, as the week wound down, I realized too late that I didn’t schedule quite enough time for painting. Alas, it’s all good. I’m happily thinking of next year.
Tips and Techniques– Take my advice and think about how much sketching and painting time you want to have while traveling or on vacation. Then factor it into your schedule. I wish I had set aside larger blocks of time each day rather than fitting it in around other activities. There’s always so much to do, but you run the risk of letting everything else come first if you don’t plan for it.
What lies ahead
A map and a blank page—what better way to start a vacation?
Tips and Techniques– Making a map often requires careful drawing, so you may find it helpful to do it in advance of your travels. You can add elements as you go right on the map or make sketches in the margins surrounding it. You can also decide how much of the place to include—you may want to zoom in on a particular area or tackle something larger. I’m thinking about including a series of maps for this trip but we’ll see…who knows what lies ahead?
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 guillemot compared to the love showered on its close relative the puffin, they set out rectify the situation. There’s even a Facebook group for those that love June 27th as a day to appreciate those under-appreciated guillemots. I’m wearing my old red Converse and sharing this post to do my part.
Tips and Techniques– If you’d like to paint and learn more about seabirds join me for Painting Seabird Portraits in Watercolor, online at Winslow Art Center starting Tuesday, July 16.
Odds and Ends
It’s been much too hot and humid to be outside, let alone sketch outdoors. So, I pulled out some things that I have wanted to paint but haven’t made time for. The seaweed floats are from a trip to California several months ago where I picked them up dry from the beach and stowed them home. I had read that you can rewet seaweed and lo and behold, it’s true! I put them in a tray of water and they went from blackened dried up bits of algae to beautiful floating fronds. The bird specimen and numbers are things I saw in Italy that were low priorities at the time, but that I find fascinating, nonetheless. And were it not so hot, I would be sketching in my garden or out along the roadside. Most of the flowers look better here in my sketchbook than outside where they are drooping from torrential rains. Wishing you all cooler weather ahead and satisfying indoor projects in the meantime.
Tips and Techniques- I set out knowing that this would be an odd collection. But as the page evolved, I saw that I might tie these disparate items together with text to explain my rationale and a wash of yellow ochre. In the end, I find it strangely satisfying, mainly because I like each of these unusual elements. So my tip is not to overlook adding odds and ends to your sketchbook. They don’t have to be pretty or important or meaningful– your sketchbook is a perfect place to record things that strike your fancy.
Drawn In 