Drawn to Drawing

Watercolor studies of Blue-gray Gnatcatchers based on recent photos. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Numerous watercolor studies of Solitary Sandpipers based on my photos. Done over 3 days. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Sumi brushpen field sketch of Solitary Sandpiper. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Sumi brushpen field sketch of Spotted Sandpiper. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Sumi brushpen field sketch of Spotted Sandpiper. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Watercolor sketches of Least Sandpipers from my photos. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski.

Watercolor sketches of Least Sandpipers from my photos. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski.

Sumi brushpen field sketch of Downy Woodpecker on feeder. 
Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Watercolor sketches of Common Yellowthroat. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

Two pencil drawings of Willow Flycatchers and based on my recent photos. My intent was to just draw what I saw and then see if I could identify it as a Willow by just looking at the drawing. Copyright 2024 by Ken Januski

 I have recently finished a new mokuhanga. But the last time I did so I posted about it but said that I felt bad about not writing a post about drawing and drawing from life and posting it first.

So to remedy that situation I'm posting all these drawings and sketches before posting about the new moku hanga prints. In my moku hanga I often talk about the composition, the orchestration of formal elements, the technique, etc., etc I do so because they are all important to me. But in doing so I don't mention how important drawing, especially from life, and capturing some part of life through drawing  are to me. It is sort of the primitive  counterpart to the more 'sophisticated' act of artistic composing. For many people I think they choose one or the other. I firmly believe in, and love, both. So without many words other than these here are some of my drawings of the last 3-4 months. Only one of them includes many details, that of the Willow Flycatcher. I did that because I wanted to see if I could identify the resulting drawing as a Willow if I faithfully copied my photo. I rarely do that. But I find that in carefully drawing what I see I often see what I had previously missed! It is more about observation than art. Most of the others focus on capturing a sense of the bird, especially of its shape and movement.

A Dragonfly a Day

Widow Skimmer. Watercolor sketch by Ken Januski

The woodcut/linocut/reduction linocut went a bit awry yesterday so I took a break and organized my collection of dragonfly photos, including some new ones from the last few weeks. As I looked at them I remembered part of what I found so fascinating about drawing insects when I did so quite a few years ago.

There is a complexity and elegance of structure that's just very desirable to put down on paper. Unlike birds or most animals there aren't any soft, furry, feathery areas that are indistinct and hide the structure. Insects have very visible structures.

It's hard to understand the appeal of this but it may just be something natural to drawing. i.e. drawing is more often about lines than anything else and insects are full of them. Of course with dragonflies there is something extra. They often have the most striking patterns in wings, body or both. Here it's the velvet blacks and blazing white of the wings of this Widow Skimmer that stand out.

I started paying attention to dragonflies and damselflies a year or two ago but it's only now that I can accurately (I think!) name more than ten of them. Naming twenty would be a great stretch. Above is a photo of the first Widow Skimmer I've ever seen. We saw it at Morris Arboretum over the past few weeks. It's a fairly common dragonfly I think and it's also a member of one of the most visible families, the Skimmers. So it's not rare. But it sure is a beauty.

About a month ago I was contorted in a somewhat odd position to take a photo of an unknown butterfly along the Wissahickon. Two runners went by and said "Weird!" as they did so. I suppose it can seem odd to some, to stop and pay attention to the beauty and complexity of nature. But then I have to ask just what is it that others find so much more interesting than nature? I'm sure there are plenty of things. At one point in my life I might have also found them quite interesting, far more so than birds, butterflies and dragonflies. But today I'd just say '"Weird!".

By the way I'm not really starting a  Dragonfly a Day project. These types of projects seem popular online, at least from what I can see. But it is something I could easily see someone more focused on dragonflies than myself taking up! They offer a lot to both viewers and artists.

Painting with Crayons

Wood Ducks, Mallard and Canada Geese at Valley Green. Crayon and wash by Ken Januski

Wood Ducks, Mallard and Canada Geese. Pencil sketch by Ken Januski

Once warblers arrive it's easy to convince myself that I ought to go out and look for them even if there are a million other things I should be doing. That happened yesterday. And of course, outside of three singing Louisiana Waterthrushes, they were nowhere to be seen. The highlight of the day was an Osprey sailing up and down the Wissahickon, calling in his full throated voice as he went. I say 'sailing' deliberately. The wind was so strong that he went by as though shot out of an arrow, twisting and turning with the curves of the stream itself.

I brougth both my Moleskine and Stillman and Birn sketchbooks. As I said last post I'm in the habit of using the Moleskine for ballpoint pen field sketches. When I took up wildlife art I pretty much thought that's what defined a 'field sketch.' And to a large extent that's true.

But I also found myself really admiring the more compositional sketches of a few wildlife artists, often done in the field as well. The problem with field sketches that just try to understand and portray the bird by itself is that they present a problem when used as the basis for a painting. How do you compose it? What goes in the background, the foreground? What are the colors, the light?

That's something that more compositional studies can accomplish. I decided that this might be a very good use of the Stillman and Birn sketchbooks. So yesterday I brought along a small 5.5x8.5. Zeta sketchbook. It was hardbound so I knew that could open it and use  it as one 8.5x11 sheet.

Since I'd seen few birds along the way, and since there were up to 30 handsome Wood Ducks, all at Valley Green I decided to sit down on one of the benches and at least work up a pencil sketch. None of these birds ever appeared as they do in the sketch above. I started with the foreground Canada Goose, then moved on to two different Wood Ducks and placed them behind him, then added a distant goose to his left, Finally I added the female Mallard that floated by later.

This type of compositional study is something that I greatly enjoy. In some ways it exemplifies the very center of art, especially natural art: creating something new out of things actually seen. It emphasizes creativity.

I'm not saying that this is a great 'creation.' I did the pencil sketch on site and then added crayon and wash in my studio over the last two days. I thought I was finished last night but when I looked at the photo I'd taken I saw that all the values seemed to be the same. In particular I thought it would be better to make the foreground darker than the background. This is the type of compositional decision that I think involves another type of artistic creativity.

The quintessential medium for this type of creativity is I think oil or acrylic, mainly because they allow endless variation, modification, fine-tuning. And that's the nature of the title of this post. I really do think that using these Caran d'Ache Neocolor II crayons allows as much flexibility and modification is as possible on a paper surface, outside of actually painting on paper. I think that's one thing I find so exciting about using them on the sturdy Stillman and Birn paper. I can get much closer to painting, and all the artistic fine-tuning that that implies, without actually using paint on canvas.

So that's why I call this post 'Painting with Crayons.' This process gets very close to painting. And for me it gives me the chance to try out small paintings. In that sense this is a true sketchbook inthe original use of the term - a tool in which ideas can be tried out.

I've often liked artists drawings more than their paintings. Rembrandt is a prime instance of this. They show the individuality, creativity, rawness of an artist without a lot of cleaning up to make presentable for the buying public. I think that's still pretty much true today. I often prefer the sketches of wildlife artists to their paintings. An exception I can think of right off is Bob Kuhn, mainly because his paintings don't have a high finish. They keep some of the raw power of sketches, and they make artistic composition as important as nature itself.

It's the ease with which I can make artistic compostional and color decisions with the crayons and the Zeta sketchbook that make me so happy with them as working method for art. Finally I should add that I'd never make a finished painting based completely on the sketch above. There's too much that I'm unhapy with. But it is enough for me to picture a painting in my minds eye, and think about how I might change it to make an actual painting. That's incredibly valuable. After I'd posted this I realized that another version might be good for this Saturday's demo, listed at upper right of this page. I won't have time to do a drawing and use crayons to color it so I've been planning to have the sketch done in advance. This is a variation on the crayon sketch, but this time done with the benefit of reference photos. It's done on Stillman and Birn Delta paper, at a largish 9x12 size. Something I've mentioned before but is worth repeating is that this paper erases beautifully.

Harriers and Mockingbirds

Ninety minutes of 30 degree birding at Morris Arboretum on Sunday reminded me that much of my field sketching is going to be on hold for the next 4-5 months. I could barely get my fingers to move enough to jot down what birds we saw, let alone sketch them.

During the winter my sketches will be done very quickly. Often I've tried to do field sketches of Northern Mockingbirds in winter. Generally what strikes me is a very long torso and tail, or a very dark eye, or a very long  bill and I'll try to capture one of those in a sketch. But then I'll come home, look at some photos and wonder where I got those ideas. So this fall when I took a photo that showed how long the torso of a Mockingbird can be I was quite happy. I've sketched that at top right above. I've also added the dark eye in most of the above sketches. The bill isn't really that long but it may be that a dark line in fron of the eye merges with the bill to make it look longer. If you look at the leftmost sketch though you  can see how I can get confused. Here the Mocker looks more like a rounded grapefruit than a very elongated bird.

I'm never happy with any attempts to do finished drawings from photos. They also seem lacking. But for understanding the structure of a bird, particularly if they show the whole bird and in good light, the sketching can be informative.

Northern Harries are quite different than Northern Mockingbirds in that I only see them on vacation. They're not a normal part of my local landscape like mockingbirds. They're magnificent birds to see but I almost never try to draw them as they drop down, lift back up, glide along then dip again, in constant movement. This year however I took my first photos at Cape May and also did a few brief sketches. The sketch above combines two photos of the same bird into one sketch. I've always admired other artist's drawings of harriers. It's nice to finally have my own.

Yellowlegs are also a vacation bird primarily though they're occasionally at Morris Arboretum. They're more regularly at Tinicum but I just don't have the time to drive down there that often. So this was another opportunity to try to learn their structure, and complex patterning, a bit better.

Finally we have the ubiquitous Northern Cardinal. Ubiquitous but impossible to draw from life. I'm not sure why this is unless it's the fact that the backyard ones are easily spooked. And then there is the black on the face of the male that I never seem to get right. Like the mockingbird they seem sleek one day and pot-bellied and heavy the next. I liked the way this photo gave a good sense of their structure so that was the impetus to do this sketch. They should be regulars in the backyard this year so maybe I'll finally do some decent field sketches.

That really is the purpose of these ballpoint pen sketches from photos I've taken: to understand the structure of certain birds so that I can do a better job when I do field sketches of them.

I recently received the wonderful book 'Wildlife in Printmaking' by Carry Ackroyd from Langford Press, publishers of the best wildlife art books in the world at least by my standards. As I've flipped through it I realize that the art I love is not limited by realism. It often takes great liberties with it. But it is founded in observation and knowledge of both the bird/animal and its surroundings. So I don't at all want to be trapped by the realism of these sketches, something quite easy to do I think. I hope that the knowledge I've gained will soon show itself in some much more abstract work, most likely in lino.

Drawing is the Foundation

I've just realized that every winter, generally sometime in January, I start doing drawings based on photos I've taken. I think that this is because I feel a need to exercise my drawing skills. They're really not getting exercised much in field sketches because I'm just not getting out much or if I do it's too cold to sketch.

This year I'm sure the desire to do accurate, careful drawings is also related to the simplifiication that I use in my linocuts. So I feel like I get back in balance my sketching.

The watercolor at top is based on some photos I took of Kildeer at Morris Arboretum late this summer or early fall. I did three detailed pencil sketches then added watercolor. At one time this method only inhibited me. I was far too cautious about not getting outside the drawn lines with watercolor. Now I realize that the lines are just a guideline. I notice them but try not to be limited by them.

It's a truism of art that drawing is the foundation of everything else. Well every once in awhile a truism is actually true, at least for me. And I'd have to say that at least 90% of my favorite artists, wildlife or otherwise, are skilled draftsmen. There's just something so satisfying about changing a three-dimensional object into a believable two-dimensional representation. Even during the many years that I was an abstract artist I loved drawing, especially from life.

In some ways I suppose it's like music. At least for many people there's an innate impulse to draw, just as there is one to sing and make music.

In any case that impulse to draw is I think what got me to create this newest watercolor, 11x14 inches on Strathmore 140# watercolor paper.

The Language of Drawing

The page at top is a scan of some recent sketches I did from photos of some White-throated Sparrows. Though we rarely get them in our backyard they have arrived in Philadelphia in the last week and, as of a couple of days ago, in our backyard as well.

I did a couple field sketches. But they flushed easily and I didn't get far with the field sketches. So I decided to do this work from photos just to familiarize myself again with the structure of them and other sparrows. After all they will be THE birds of the next 4-5 months!

Drawing them, the recent field sketches I've done, a recent conversation with a birder who watched me sketch at a local hawk watch and then asked about field sketching, and finally the reproduction of a tremendous Goya drawing in a recent New York Times article on a show of Spanish drawings all led me to this post.

About 25 years ago I ran across a book that talked about drawing as a part of a general education in the US over 100 years ago. It was just considered a basic and necessary skill. A far cry from today. I never read the book and may be slightly misremembering it. But I think my memory is basically correct. Drawing at one time was just much more important than it is now.

And yet.... I love drawing. Even when I was an abstract painter I loved drawing. But it is an odd thing. It changes the 3-dimensional world into two dimensions. It also seized the world in a way. Seizes it and puts it down. In that sense I think it may be almost an atavistic human impulse.

I think what got me thinking about this more than anything else was: 1, the Goya drawing. It's the best that drawing can be. And 2, the conversation with the hawk watcher who was interested in my field sketches at the feeder below the hawkwatching platform. He mentioned Urban Sketchers, a site I've looked at a few times, as well as a site devoted to sketches in Moleskine sketchbooks, a type of sketchbook I often use. That reminded me of the Sketching in Nature blog that I often notice in the Art section of the Nature Blog Network. And then there is this very odd New York Times blog on learning to draw. The odd thing is not the blog, but it's location at the New York Times. Still it's one more example of a seeming increase in interest in drawing.

Basically what I saw was the very highest type of art, as in the Goya, as well as the broad appeal of drawing as in all of the various web sites. It looks like there is almost a Renaissance of drawing, especially of sketching from life, whether it be people, cityscapes, nature, birds or whatever.

I could never prove this. And since I'm not part of any of the blogs and websites I mentioned I don't really have a good feel for it. I do spend a lot of time at the Wildlife Art section of birdforum.net as I've mentioned many times. There is a great appreciation of birds drawn from life there. But all in all I'm just not part of any such movement and so all I can do is speak from an outsider's viewpoint.

But it's hard not to notice this seeming widespread desire to draw and particularly to draw from life. That strikes me as very good and very welcome. I think it's the foundation of good art. And that Goya reminds me of just how exceptionally good drawing can be.

Like music it's a sign of the best in human culture. The more of it the better.

Drawing Shorebirds

As promised I've started the first artworks based on the photos taken last week at Cape May, NJ on the 'Osprey'. This is the start of a charcoal drawing of a Short-billed Dowitcher. I had done an even earlier stage but the first thing I noticed is that the gesture was completely wrong, and lifeless. The current version shows some darker, stronger lines meant to simplify the drawing and retrieve a sense of the actual movement of the Dowitcher. As I work on it I hope to improve the sense of movement, and grace, in the Dowitcher. And eventually there should be a greater sense of the feather pattern. These are truly handsome birds and I hope that the final stage of the drawing will show that.

Acadian Flycatcher in Pastel - Surprise Shapes

I think that this drawing is done. I've let it sit for a week while I looked at it. I made some minor changes, the main one being the addition of darker gray/browns to the upper part of the drawing so that it wouldn't be misread as sky.

As I've looked at it I realized that it isn't as much about color as I'd thought. Like most of my work, abstract or realistic, shape is very important. I'm not sure why I didn't realize that about this drawing. Now that it's done I see how much the tree limbs stand out. Perhaps because they are fairly realistic, and not based too much on my imagination, I just didn't think about them playing an important part in the 'art' of the drawing that I mentioned in an earlier post. But they do.

MY Artistic Convention(s)

As I've looked at my other work over the last week I realize that most of it involves a love of drawing, especially drawing in the sense of carving an object out of the flat dimension of paper or canvas. Sometimes those shapes are realistic, and strive to capture the contours of what I see. At other times they are abstract and more concerned with carving a new object from nothing. In both cases they generally show some of the process involved.

Showing the process involved in a work of art is a 20th century art convention. In the eyes of some most conventions eventually seem to be cliches. The most noticeable example of this I think is the gratuitous painterly drip. Nonetheless it is MY convention. I don't feel right hiding all aspects of the act of illusion creation that is the basis of most representational art. So if someone might wonder why I might not do smoother, more finished drawings, especially as I create the shapes, this is why. I just don't like too much smoothness and the hiding of the process of creating the illusion. For me there is some work involved in getting shapes right. I like to let some of that work show. I realize this is a convention. It does not in itself create better art. But it's my convention.

Palm Warblers and Unabandoned Paintings

It's been almost two months since my last post. During that time spring migration has largely come and gone. We witnessed it in three states: Illinois, Virginia and here at home in Pennsylvania. But during that great time of the year it always seems far more important to be out as spring and bird migration occur, in the midst of it all, rather than typing away at a computer screen. And of course that's the great irony of nature-related blogs: they may often be used in praise of nature but all the while that they're being created and read is time away from nature. A beautiful photo of a Blackburnian Warbler or piled up clouds on the Blue Ridges of Virginia will never begin to equal actually being out and seeing both the warbler and the clouds.

That said much of that time I use to take photos or make sketches that will later be used for artwork. Over time some of that will appear here and at my primary web site

My last post included a sketch of a Palm Warbler seen while walking along the Wissahickon and trying to figure out what to do for my next painting. Palms are always some of the very earliest warblers of spring migration in the eastern U.S. They're rich golden yellow wash is always a pleasant change from the grays of winter. I wasn't surprised to see them in Philadelphia in early April but I didn't expect to find them in Illinois in early May. I envisioned some of the later warblers that would normally be seen in Philadelphia in early May, not to mention other neo-Tropical migrants like Baltimore Orioles. However my first day birding in Illinois, at the Oakdale Nature Preserve in Freeport, Illinois was a drizzly day in the 40s. In that weather Palm Warblers seemed right. I was just hoping for 70s and Black-Throated Greens!

I took many photos of cooperative Palm Warblers while in Illinois. On one day I wanted to surprise my wife, who was busy with family matters, with a watercolor based on the birds seen that day. So about 4:30 p.m. I went to a photo-processing kiosk at a local drug store and made my first attempt at editing/ordering photos straight off a memory card. Usually I do this at home with my own photo-editing software. The process was a bit clunky but nonetheless I walked out of the store 30 minutes later with a number of photos. They in turn became the source of the small watercolor at top of this post. I finished it before 7 p.m. I imagine there are no awards for speed painting and I wouldn't be interested if there were. Good art is rarely done speedily. But I did have to marvel at the speed of the entire process!

I now have three or four very quick watercolors of Palm Warblers. Soon I'll take a little more time to do a more developed one

Red-headed Woodpecker, Yellow-throated Vireo, White Pelicans and Sandhill Cranes

Other high birding points of the Illinois trip included a very cooperative Red-headed Woodpecker and a Yellow-throated Vireo that stayed about 6 feet off the ground on bare branches rather than 30 feet off the ground buried in vegetation. I saw both of these at Lake Le-Aqua-Na State Park. We don't often see either of these birds so it was great to see both within 25 feet of one another.

One other interesting birding sight: a flock of White Pelicans flying down the Rock River near Castle Rock State Park. Some birds, for example Sandhill Cranes, Great Blue Herons, and White Pelicans, always stop me in my tracks when I see them in flight. There is always something both primordial and magisterial in the image they present.

Speaking of interesting birding sights I also can't forget the 8-10 Sandhill Cranes seen at Chain O' Lakes State Park or the four that landed in front of us as we approached Monroe, Wisconsin. I'd forgotten that we'd seen any notable birds in our brief time in Wisconsin, but the sight of them appearing out of the sky in front of us and landing in the mud of a local farm was enough to make me slam on the brakes and pull off to the side of the road to take a look. I don't think we've ever gotten such a close look at them.

The Unabandoned Painting

The last post included a pen and ink drawing that was to be the basis of the "abandoned painting," the one I couldn't decide what to do with. In mid-April I finished it. The image above is a small version of it. A larger image is at my main web site. I'm happy with it.

I wasn't really sure what to do with this painting. There was a temptation to do a flattened painting where one or more Canada Warblers would be pinned to the flat space of a painting by the various verticals of the stems of the shrubs in which they sat. That would have worked but that type of painting can give precedence to design over subject matter. I've done plenty of that but I didn't want to to it here. I also didn't want to do a vignette, so common in bird paintings. The end result is this multiple vignette. I'm not sure why I chose this but it was an interesting experiment.

That catches me up somewhat on older birding and art activities. I hope the next post will include some new art.

Lone Palm Warbler

I spent three hours walking along the Wissahickon on Thursday. I had no intention of doing this. I was supposed to be inside working on a new painting. But sometimes it seems as if I'm forcing a new painting when I'm really not sure what I want to do. In that case it's often better to just drop it and go for a walk. Given that spring migrants are starting to arrive it wasn't hard to convince myself to do so.

It started off sunny but became overcast almost instantly and stayed that way. Unlike a week ago, where the woods was filled with the sounds and sights of birds, it couldn't have been quieter. When I finally got down to the water I found some small birds high in the hemlocks and sycamores. Unfortunately they had all their color washed out by the overcast sky. Among the birds I did find were: one Brown Creeper, one Golden-Crowned Kinglet, one American Goldfinch and some unidentified warblers. The gray sky, and lack of calls, left me no choice but to leave them unidentified.

From there I walked about a mile along the Wissahickon before doubling back on the other side of the water. Typical birds like Cardinals, Downy Woodpeckers, White-Breasted Nuthatches, et al., eventually totaled another 10 species.

When I got back to where I'd first seen the unidentified warblers one lone Palm Warbler, my first for 2008, made an appearance. He was still high in the sycamores and hemlocks, but his rich burnt siena color shone through the gray, and his constantly twitching tale, confirmed his identity. While moving closer to get a better view of him I flushed a Hermit Thrush out of some rhododendrons for the second time in the past couple of weeks. I've noticed that the Hermit Thrush doesn't have a twitching tail so much as one that seems to be operated like a hydraulic lift. It seems to land, slowly raise its tail up horizontally and then slowly lower it back down, as though it's being controlled hydraulically. One of the reasons that birding remains so rewarding is that there's always something new like this to notice.

The drawing at top is a small pen and watercolor sketch of a palm warbler based on a photo I took about this time two years ago at the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge. The one big difference is that bright sunshine accentuated the rich golden and burnt siena colors of the Palm Warbler. Though they're not all that uncommon they remain one of my favorite warblers, I think because of both their early appearance and their striking colors.

The Abandoned Painting

Though it was nice to be out I still had an abandoned painting to deal with when I got back home. Finally I decided to try some pen and ink sketches from some photos of a very cooperative Blackburnian Warbler that landed a few feet in front of my wife and myself last May. Working in pen and ink is a bit unforgiving. Unlike pencil or charcoal you can't erase your mistakes. This either gives an unbearably stiff quality to them, primarily from people who know all too well that you can't erase any marks that you put down, or alternatively can give them both greater sureness of touch and greater vitality. For some reason that seemed the best way to work my way towards a new painting. I guess it's sort of like thinking out loud, though in this case it's drawing out loud.

In doing 'bird' or 'wildlife' art my intent is both to be true to the subject matter and to make a work of art. As many people will tell you once you start talking about making 'art' you've made the task more complicated, not necessarily better just more complicated. I'm not going to go into great depth about this except to say that it can give some self-consciousness to the process that can be stifling. In my case for just this one new painting that included questions like: if I do a watercolor based on one the my recent photos of birds will they be too subject to the cropping/framing that often takes place in photos; do I really want to flatten out the space the way that some framing can do; do my photos have enough detail that I can adequately represent all parts of the bird; if some parts are in shadow do I know enough about the structure of birds to construct it from my imagination; am I making the painting too limited by sticking to what is in the photo; can I improvise elements that aren't in the photo; do i just want to do a vignette of a bird where it floats in empty space.

Well obviously this is enough to put anyone to sleep, including the artist! For whatever reason I finally decided to start a new large watercolor based on photos of the same Canada Warbler in more or less the same position taken over a 1-2 minute period. This is something of a multi-vignette and I have no idea how I'll tie all the separate subjects together. I've never tried anything like this before.

This is the initial pen and ink sketch. Tomorrow I start adding watercolor.