Field Sketching with a Scope

You can blame it on the snipe! It's always easier to sketch live birds when you can see them through a spotting scope. This is because you can see more detail since scopes have higher magnifications than binoculars, and more importantly because you now can look and draw at the same.

It's such a luxury to be looking at the bird through a scope then glance quickly down at your sketchbook to make some marks. When I bird without a scope there's always the need for more than two hands. You need two hands to hole the binoculars, though I know some people can do it one-handed.

But even if I did weight exercises so that I could easiiy lift the binoculars with one hand there's still another problem. While my eyes are up where the binoculars are in front of my eyes my sketchpad is far below, generally around waist level. Often I find that I look at bird with two hands holding binoculars, then drop them and put sketchbook in one hand and pen in another. Great until I need to take another look at bird. Where do I put the pen and sketchbook while I put both hands on binoculars? Often I keep the pen in my right hand and the sketchbook in left as I raise binoculars. This is a good formula for losing sketchbook, pen or both.

I won't go on but you can see the difficulty. That's why it's so incredibly easier to use a scope. The problem is that it is heavy as is the tripod that is necessary to hold it. So I rarely take it out in winter. I don't think it will be worth the hassle of the weight. Come spring it's another story though, as birds finally become prolific.

They're not quite prolific yet but there was another reason to bring out the scope today. We flushed at least two Wilson's Snipe at Morris Arboretum on Sunday. They kept coming back to same location, well hidden until we flushed them again. Never did we get a good look.

So on the offchance that they were still there I decided to bring scope, hoping that I could get a good look, and sketch them, before scaring them off. Well no such luck. There was no sign of any shorebirds today.

But there were turtles and swallows in particular. Above a Tree Swallow, snapping turtle, head low to water, and a Canada Goose on nest on left page. On right a male and female Belted Kingfisher as well as one of many Painted Turtles on a log. It was such a pleasure to be able to look at them and sketch them without constantly lamenting the lack of four hands!

I also did some field sketching without scope over the previous few days. You can see the difference. Eastern Phoebe and White-throated Sparrow on left, wonderful Great Blue Heron with crest on right along with a nother Eastern Phoebe, a Carolina Chickadee, a Wood Duck in flight and the first Blue-gray Gnatcatcher of the year. The latter bird is elongated. I always enlongate them unintentionally. I've vowed that this is the year I finally get them right. Next time....

Slouching Toward Realism

Well maybe. When I started this painting I thought I'd head in a more abstract direction. And I did for awhile. But today I took a step in the opposite direction. I had left different color planes in the water so that there was a largely abstract subdivision of space. I llked this and I think it may be why I thought of Matisse's 'Bathers by a River' when I started.

But I also knew it wasn't realistic. It bothered me a bit. Today after adding more details to the head of each heron as well as to the painted turtle I decided to try to unify the water. Maybe the realistic direction of the detail on herons and turtle was contagious. In any csse for the time being we're headed in a more realistic direction.

As I said earlier my old abstract paintings always meandered like this before finally settling down. It's always been the way I've worked, though media like watercolor and linocut allow only so much meandering and change of direction. In the first you eventually end up with mud; in the latter you've cut away all the lino and have little left except the bare white of the printed paper. Oil and acrylic though lend to nearly infinite variation. That is both good and bad. One thing I am reminded of is that on a large canvas it gets expensive! Paint, and more paint, and more paint....

I'm not thrilled with the expense. But I am thrilled by working in this manner again. When I first started this blog I often wrote that I felt my work was no longer very ambitious. I was too busy learning realism and birds to be ambitious. But now I'm more comfortable and I like the excitement of trying to do larger, more ambitious paintings.

They can also entail more mental strain though at times. So it's good to know that warmer weather is slowly winding its way here and field sketching will soon be available again. It's the perfect break from ambitious paintings.

Winterizing

I knew that it couldn't be true -- 6 to 10 inches of snow this weekend for Philadelphia. It's still October. We often don't get snow until January! And yet that's the current forecast.

But the House Sparrows at my studio window feeder looked like they might be preparing for snow. The sketch above is based on sparrows at my window. When there are a lot of them feeding frantically I can assure you that they don't sit still for long. Most of the time they're fighting. Just as I start one another sparrow lands on or near him or her and starts fighting. Often I can only get one line down, like the breast in the female at lower left, before the bird is gone. I need to try to remember the rest of the bird. Or, wait until another bird takes a similar pose.

This may seem either silly or masochistic. But it actually is fun. You're forced to really think about how the bird is put together. For instance you may need to put a head on a sparrow, as I did at lower left. Inevitably some things will be wrong. But just as true is the fact that you might capture some sense of life. And you do get more familiar with the birds you're sketching.

For this I'm using a Bic 537R ball point pen. It's extraordinary how much the ink runs when water touches it. Normally this would be a catastrophe. But here I like it. It's a very quick way to change a drawing into a painting, or at least a wash drawing. And you never know what surprises you might get.

Just as the sparrows are winterizing I've been doing the same, along with my wife, around the house and garden. Today just in time for the cold and snow I finished making some new windows for our cold frame. These are metal windows that I picked up off the street years ago thinking that they might come in handy. But they need a wooden frame to work as tops for the cold frame. I spent the last few days using a Stanley handheld multiplane to dado out grooves in some 2x2s to put the window into. They're not perfect but they look like they should keep the cold out. So my many choi seedlings will I hope be able to grow to a usable state. And my poor little basil seedlings, planted very late as you can guess, may survive long enough to give a bit of basil flavor to November and perhaps December meals.

Between this type of winterizing work, preparing frames and mats for the MRAC show, and getting end of warm weather birding in before it's too late I haven't done much in the way of art. When that happens I often feel like I need to do some sort of doodling, sort of thoughtless art, to warm myself and figure out where I want to go.

Recently I've done some of that with the runny ball point pen and a Stillman & Birn Gamma sketchbook. But that sketchbook isn't made for strong washes. So I finally broke down and bought a Delta sketchbook with a much heavier paper. I really wanted to try it out. So that's what you see above: the same Bic pen, watercolor and the Delta paper. This shows the immature Little Blue Heron that I saw at Morris Arboretum this summer along with a Painted Turtle, happily looking in the opposite direction as the heron. I've always tempted to do something with it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to take that composition out for a spin.

I do really like the ability to test out compositions like this. Eventually it or some of the other recent similar experiments should end up as paintings or prints.

Field Sketches Prove Rich Trove

It's hard to believe that it was only 10-14 days ago that I did field sketches at Morris Arboretum of Belted Kingfishers, Painted Turtles and Snow. Since then I've done one wash drawing based on this scene as well as one more fully developed watercolor. Today I finished a linocut on the same theme.

This print is 9x12 inches for the entire print, 6x8 inches for just the image. It's printed in a dark slate gray, though it may look black in the photos, on cream Rives Lightweight paper. It's an edition of 12.

I've titled this post as I have because it all came about because of my field sketches. Often when I'm out people will look at them, see that they're not fully developed, and I suspect sort of write them off as scribbles. But for the artists I admire they are the richest sort of material you can find. Photos don't hold a candle, not even a cheap wooden match to them. I've written about this many times so there's no point in repeating myself. But I did think the work I've done based on those small sketches is a good illustration of my point.

I did do something different with this print. I used transfer paper to trace the outline of the last watercolor onto the linoleum block. In the past I've used my own primitive makeshift methods that give me a rough skeleton to improvise on. The one problem is that sometimes the lines don't have th sureness of the original drawing, sketch or watercolor. I'd prefer to just carve into the block while looking at my original work. But relief prints print in reverse so if I copy what I see I'll actually get a print with everything in reverse. Thus the need for some sort of transfer method.

So finally I broke down and bought some transfer paper. Only problem: the print came out in reverse. To make a long story short this print is actually a reverse of the last watercolor. Normally I wouldn't want to do that because often such reversals just look wrong. But in this case I think it did not harm it. And it was too late to do anything anyway.

I also was tempted to do this as a reduction print, using more than one color. But I finally decided to keep it simple. But there still may be a multi-color reduction print on the horizon.

Lastly I'm very happy having captured this unusual scene: snow, basking turtles and a Belted Kingfisher. That's the type of thing I aspire to.

Developing the Kingfisher and Turtles

It's been awhile since I've done anything other than quick works and sketches. That's fine. I feel like I need to move back and forth between the easy and the hard, that which puts a lot of pressure on me and that which puts little. Of course that pressure is primarly the pressure of failure.

But you never really improve without risking failure. There's only the thrill of success when you realize that you're taking a chance and risking something. But this does take a toll, so I for one have never seen any need to put constant pressure on myself.

All of which is a long roundabout way of saying I wanted to try something more ambitious with my sketches of the Belted Kingfisher, Painted Turtles and Snow.

The accompanying photos show two versions of a new watercolor. It's a slightly different design than the last wash study. One of the things I'm finally starting to get comfortable with in representational work is modifying what I actually saw. For years I couldn't do this. I only felt comfortable drawing or painting exactly what I saw, whether in real life or from a photo I took. But happily that has changed. And there is something thrilling about creating your own world, almost like writing a novel.

The first version at top is the most recent version. I changed it from the second photo because I was afraid the kingfisher got lost in all the surrounding blue. So I made some of the water a bit more green/brown. And that was probably accurate as well. I didn't take any photos of the water so I can't say for sure.

I'm not sure if this is done. Pretty close if not actually done. You can only work a watercolor so far without ruining it. And I still think I'll do a linocut of this same subject.

Winter, Spring, Bamboo Pen, Wash

Even when I was out doing the recent field sketches of Belted Kingfisher and Painted Turtles in nearly 70 degree temps, there was snow all around me. Yesterday was the second day of the Great Backyard Bird Count and yet it was so windy that there were almost no birds at our backyard feeder and only one solitary Ring-billed Gull in my 20 minute walk around the Roxborough Reservoir. So spring was here just briefly. Today it's back to being cold and snow is in the forecast over the next week.

Still I did think about capturing the odd juxtaposition of turtles basking on logs in the sun while the surrounding ground was covered in snow. And I also wanted to get the kingfisher in. He was in the same pond, often perched on snags, but never close enough to be in the same view. I did something similar last year with a Great Blue Heron and Belted Kingfisher also seen in the snow for the GBBC. The birds were never so close together that they'd appear in a photo if I were to take it of the actual scene, at least not large enough to be identified. But artistically I wanted to put them in the same scene, to take some artistic liberties.

I'd recently seen some wash drawings that I'd like. Some were by John Constable, others by Claude Lorrain. Both reminded me of how much I enjoyed wash drawings. So when I looked for a way to experiment with designs for a finished work, maybe watercolor maybe linocut, I thought about doing a wash drawing. But how to do the ink drawing?

For years I used to do large nudes using a bamboo reed pen. I see you can still buy a set of three for under $4. They are a bit messy because there's no reservoir to hold the ink. You just have what sticks to the end of the pen when you put it in the ink. But they do make a very quick and fluid line. That's what I always loved about them. In any case I got out one I hadn't used in 30 years or so and used it with some equally old India ink. Then after that I used watercolor brush to add wash and straight India ink.

There's room for improvement in this. But it did what I wanted, allow me to test out a quick design that combined bird, turtles and snow. I think it stands alone. But it also may be just one step on the way to something more developed. I do love capturing these odd natural moments.